BRET STEPHENS: THE ANTI-ISRAEL LEFT NEEDS TO TAKE A HARD LOOK AT ITSELF

On Saturday morning in southern Israel, Hamas murdered hundreds of people at a music festival and kidnapped others at gunpoint to serve as human shields in the Gaza Strip. On Sunday afternoon in New York City’s midtown Manhattan, a speaker at a rally of pro-Palestinian and left-wing groups celebrated that atrocity — one of thousands suffered by Israelis over the past few days, which we later learned included the killing of babies and toddlers.

“As you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters,” a speaker said. “But I’m sure they’re doing very fine despite what The New York Post says.” He was met with cheers.

I went to see the rally for myself: Would there be even perfunctory condemnation of Hamas’ methods? A brief nod of sympathy to Israel’s anguish? Some banal nod to the cause of peace and nonviolence? Not that I heard. What I saw was giddiness and gloating, as if someone’s team had won the World Cup. Hamas had perpetrated the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, and the crowd was euphoric.

Similar scenes unfolded across the world. In London, an estimated 5,000 demonstrators gathered near the Israeli Embassy and shot off fireworks toward the building. At a rally at the Sydney Opera House in Australia, chants of “Free Palestine” gave way to the underlying emotion: “Fthe Jews.” At Harvard University, almost three dozen campus groups issued a joint statement holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” A statement from Yalies4Palestine insisted that “Breaking out of a prison requires force, not desperate appeals to the colonizer.”

Whatever else might be said about these demonstrations and declarations, give the protesters and manifesto writers points for honesty. “Pro-Palestine,” to many of them, is pro-Hamas. “Anti-occupation” is opposition to Israel’s right to exist in any form. Israelis are guilty by virtue of being Israelis, so their murder and humiliation is something to laugh at. When “Zionism Is Genocide,” as placards at the demonstration put it, then no means are too awful to put a stop to it.

If twice as many Israelis had been murdered Saturday, would it have chastened the demonstrators or made them doubly glad, by the algorithm in which the terminally self-righteous become cheerleaders for slaughter?

Not all the far left was quite as far gone. The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America had promoted the rally on social media, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the group’s most prominent member, denounced the rally and issued a 66-word statement in which she condemned “Hamas’s attack in the strongest possible terms.”

That was followed by a demand for “an immediate cease-fire and de-escalation.” Someone should tell the New York congresswoman: To call for a cease-fire, now, is to shield the killers from consequences and deny their victims the right to effective self-defense. It is, in the language of the old left, “objectively” pro-Hamas, even as it masquerades as a call for peace.

Something similar must be said about a much broader swath of the left that looks in heartfelt horror at what happened Saturday but rarely stops to wonder whether it played any role in creating the moral and intellectual climate for what has unfolded.

I’m talking about the bien pensant for whom anti-Zionism — not just legitimate opposition to various aspects of Israeli policy, but the denial of Israel’s right to exist in any form — is a respectable political position, rather than simply an updated form of antisemitism. I’m talking about United Nations rapporteurs and once-great human-rights organizations that traffic in the lie that Israel deliberately created an “open-air prison” in Gaza, never mind that Gaza shares a border with Egypt, or that Israel vacated the territory nearly 20 years ago only to be repaid by endless assaults from above and below the ground.

I’m talking about the university presidents who stand for free speech when it comes to antisemitism but become notably censorious when it comes to other forms of controversial speech. I’m talking about the political leaders who repeatedly promise solidarity with Israel only to quickly demand restraint when Israel seeks to destroy the infrastructure by which Hamas maintains its war machine. I’m talking about narratives that seem calibrated to create the outrageous impression that Israeli soldiers deliberately kill Palestinian children. I’m talking about the people whose fury at the Israeli government never seems to abate but who barely pause to observe that Hamas is a dictatorship of religious zealots or that President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority is a fulminating antisemite.

Taken separately, none of this directly threatens a single Israeli life. Taken together, it goes far to explain how Israel, the nation of the Jews, is routinely treated, as some have said, like “the Jew of nations,” with consequences spelled in blood. If some of the anti-Israel left find themselves looking on in horror at what happened Saturday, now is a good time for them to take a long, hard look at themselves.

Gaza’s Miseries Have Palestinian Authors, by Bret Stephens

For the third time in two weeks, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have set fire to the Kerem Shalom border crossing, through which they get medicine, fuel and other humanitarian essentials from Israel. Soon we’ll surely hear a great deal about the misery of Gaza. Try not to forget that the authors of that misery are also the presumptive victims.

There’s a pattern here — harm yourself, blame the other — and it deserves to be highlighted amid the torrent of morally blind, historically illiterate criticism to which Israelis are subjected every time they defend themselves against violent Palestinian attack.

In 1970, Israel set up an industrial zone along the border with Gaza to promote economic cooperation and provide Palestinians with jobs. It had to be shut down in 2004 amid multiple terrorist attacks that left 11 Israelis dead.

In 2005, Jewish-American donors forked over $14 million dollars to pay for greenhouses that had been used by Israeli settlers until the government of Ariel Sharon withdrew from the Strip. Palestinians looted dozens of the greenhouses almost immediately upon Israel’s exit.

In 2007, Hamas took control of Gaza in a bloody coup against its rivals in the Fatah faction. Since then, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups in the Strip have fired nearly 10,000 rockets and mortars from Gaza into Israel — all the while denouncing an economic “blockade” that is Israel’s refusal to feed the mouth that bites it. (Egypt and the Palestinian Authority also participate in the same blockade, to zero international censure.)

In 2014 Israel discovered that Hamas had built 32 tunnels under the Gaza border to kidnap or kill Israelis. “The average tunnel requires 350 truckloads of construction supplies,” The Wall Street Journal reported, “enough to build 86 homes, seven mosques, six schools or 19 medical clinics.” Estimated cost of tunnels: $90 million.

Want to understand why Gaza is so poor? See above.

Which brings us to the grotesque spectacle along Gaza’s border over the past several weeks, in which thousands of Palestinians have tried to breach the fence and force their way into Israel, often at the cost of their lives. What is the ostensible purpose of what Palestinians call “the Great Return March”?

That’s no mystery. This week, The Times published an op-ed by Ahmed Abu Artema, one of the organizers of the march. “We are intent on continuing our struggle until Israel recognizes our right to return to our homes and land from which we were expelled,” he writes, referring to homes and land within Israel’s original borders.

His objection isn’t to the “occupation” as usually defined by Western liberals, namely Israel’s acquisition of territories following the 1967 Six Day War. It’s to the existence of Israel itself. Sympathize with him all you like, but at least notice that his politics demand the elimination of the Jewish state.

Notice, also, the old pattern at work: Avow and pursue Israel’s destruction, then plead for pity and aid when your plans lead to ruin.

The world now demands that Jerusalem account for every bullet fired at the demonstrators, without offering a single practical alternative for dealing with the crisis.

But where is the outrage that Hamas kept urging Palestinians to move toward the fence, having been amply forewarned by Israel of the mortal risk? Or that protest organizers encouraged women to lead the charges on the fence because, as The Times’s Declan Walsh reported, “Israeli soldiers might be less likely to fire on women”? Or that Palestinian children as young as 7 were dispatched to try to breach the fence? Or that the protests ended after Israel warned Hamas’s leaders, whose preferred hide-outs include Gaza’s hospital, that their own lives were at risk?

Elsewhere in the world, this sort of behavior would be called reckless endangerment. It would be condemned as self-destructive, cowardly and almost bottomlessly cynical.

The mystery of Middle East politics is why Palestinians have so long been exempted from these ordinary moral judgments. How do so many so-called progressives now find themselves in objective sympathy with the murderers, misogynists and homophobes of Hamas? Why don’t they note that, by Hamas’s own admission, some 50 of the 62 protesters killed on Monday were members of Hamas? Why do they begrudge Israel the right to defend itself behind the very borders they’ve been clamoring for years for Israelis to get behind?

Why is nothing expected of Palestinians, and everything forgiven, while everything is expected of Israelis, and nothing forgiven?

That’s a question to which one can easily guess the answer. In the meantime, it’s worth considering the harm Western indulgence has done to Palestinian aspirations.

No decent Palestinian society can emerge from the culture of victimhood, violence and fatalism symbolized by these protests. No worthy Palestinian government can emerge if the international community continues to indulge the corrupt, anti-Semitic autocrats of the Palestinian Authority or fails to condemn and sanction the despotic killers of Hamas. And no Palestinian economy will ever flourish through repeated acts of self-harm and destructive provocation.

If Palestinians want to build a worthy, proud and prosperous nation, they could do worse than try to learn from the one next door. That begins by forswearing forever their attempts to destroy it.

Bret Stephens: Iran Cheats, Obama Whitewashes The administration thinks a nuclear Iran is inevitable—but lacks the courage to say it.

Does it matter what sort of deal—or further extension, or non-deal—ultimately emerges from the endless parleys over Iran’s nuclear program? Probably not. Iran came to the table cheating on its nuclear commitments. It continued to cheat on them throughout the interim agreement it agreed to last year. And it will cheat on any undertakings it signs.

We knew this, know it and will come to know it all over again. But what’s at stake in these negotiations isn’t their outcome, assuming there ever is an outcome. It’s the extent to which the outcome facilitates, or obstructs, our willingness to continue to fool ourselves about the consequences of an Iran with a nuclear weapon.

The latest confirmation of the obvious comes to us courtesy of a Nov. 17 report from David Albright and his team at the scrupulously nonpartisan Institute for Science and International Security. The ISIS study, based on findings from the International Atomic Energy Agency, concluded that Iran was stonewalling U.N. inspectors on the military dimensions of its program. It noted that Tehran had tested a model for an advanced centrifuge, in violation of the 2013 interim agreement. And it cited Iran for trying to conceal evidence of nuclear-weapons development at a military facility called Parchin.

“By failing to address the IAEA’s concerns, Iran is complicating, and even threatening, the achievement of a long term nuclear deal,” the report notes dryly.

These are only Iran’s most recent evasions, piled atop two decades of documented nuclear deception. Nothing new there. But what are we to make of an American administration that is intent on providing cover for Iran’s coverups? “The IAEA has verified that Iran has complied with its commitments,” Wendy Sherman, the top U.S. nuclear negotiator, testified in July to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “It has done what it promised to do.” John Kerry went one better, telling reporters Monday that “Iran has lived up” to its commitments.

The statement is false: Yukiya Amano, the director general of the IAEA, complained last week that Iran had “not provided any explanations that enable the Agency to clarify the outstanding practical measures” related to suspected work on weaponization. Since when did trust but verify become whitewash and hornswoggle?

That’s a question someone ought to ask Mr. Kerry or Ms. Sherman at their next committee appearance, especially since it has become clear that the administration has a record of arms-control dissembling. To wit, the State Department under Hillary Clintonhad reason to know that Russia—with which the U.S. was then in “reset” mode—was violating the 1987 treaty on Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces. Yet it didn’t disclose this in arms-control reports to Congress, nor did it mention the fact prior to the Senate’s 2010 ratification of the New Start treaty on strategic weapons.

“We’re not going to pass another treaty in the U.S. Senate if our colleagues [in the administration] are sitting up there knowing somebody is cheating.” That was then-Sen. John Kerry in November 2012, complaining about the coverup. The administration only came clean about the Kremlin’s breaches last summer, presumably after it had finally given up hopes for its Russian reset.

Why the spin and dishonesty? Partly it’s the old Platonic conceit of the Noble Lie—public bamboozlement in the service of the greater good—that propels so much contemporary liberal policy-making (cf. Gruber, Jonathan: transparency, lack of). So long as the higher goal is a health-care bill, or arms control with Russia, or a nuclear deal with Iran, why should the low truth of facts and figures interfere with the high truth of hopes and ideals?

But this lets the administration off too easily. The real problem is cowardice. As a matter of politics it cannot acknowledge what, privately, it believes: that a nuclear Iran is undesirable but probably inevitable and hardly catastrophic. As a matter of strategy, it refuses to commit to the only realistic course of action that could accomplish the goal it professes to seek: The elimination of Iran’s nuclear capabilities by a combination of genuinely crippling sanctions and targeted military strikes.

And so—because the administration lacks the political courage of its real convictions or the martial courage of its fake ones—we are wedded to this sham process of negotiation. “They pretend to pay us; we pretend to work,” went the old joke about labor in the Soviet Union. Just so with these talks. Iranians pretend not to cheat; we pretend not to notice. All that’s left to do is stand back and wait for something to happen.

Eventually, something will happen. Perhaps Iran will simply walk away from the talks, daring this feckless administration to act. Perhaps we will discover another undeclared Iranian nuclear facility, possibly not in Iran itself. Perhaps the Israelis really will act. Perhaps the Saudis will.

All of this may suit the president’s psychological yearning to turn himself into a bystander—innocent, in his own eyes—in the Iranian nuclear crisis. But it’s also a useful reminder that, in the contest between hard-won experience and disappointed idealism, the latter always wins in the liberal mind.

Bibi and Barack on the Rocks The White House’s resort to petty insults risks a strategic relationship

The relationship between the Obama administration and the government of Israel is beginning to look like one of those longtime marriages you encounter all the time. Maybe you’re in one yourself. He feels, Rodney Dangerfield-like, that he gets no respect. She’d be happy to offer some—if only she could find something to respect.

The solution is a trial separation. Give this couple time apart to figure out what, if anything, still draws them together.

The latest eruption of pettiness—when marriages are in trouble, it’s always the petty things that tell—was the very public refusal of John Kerry and Joe Biden to meet with Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon during his visit to Washington last week. Mr. Yaalon was quoted earlier this year saying some impolitic things about the U.S. secretary of state, including that he was “obsessive and messianic” and that “the only thing that can save us is if Kerry wins the Nobel Prize and leaves us alone.”

The comments were made privately but were leaked to the press. Mr. Yaalon apologized for them. His meeting with Chuck Hagel at the Pentagon last week was all smiles. Asked by the Washington Post’s Lally Weymouth about the Kerry kerfuffle, he replied, “We overcame that.”

Or not.

“Despite the fact that Yaalon’s requests to meet with the senior members of the Obama administration were declined over a week ago, Washington waited until the visit ended before making the story public in order to humiliate the Israeli defense minister,” Ha’aretz reported. Mr. Yaalon is now said to be under an Obama administration “quarantine” until he performs additional penance, perhaps by recanting his hard-line views about the advisability of a nuclear deal with Iran or a peace deal with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

The good news here is that at least there’s one kind of quarantine this administration believes in. The bad news is that it seems to give more thought to pursuing personal vendettas against allies like Israel than it does to waging effective military campaigns against enemies like ISIS.

The administration also seems to have forgotten that two can play the game. Two days after the Yaalon snub, the Israeli government announced the construction of 1,000 new housing units in so-called East Jerusalem, including 600 new units in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood that was the subject of a 2010 row with Joe Biden. Happy now, Mr. Vice President?

The real problem for the administration is that the Israelis—along with all the other disappointed allies—are learning how little it pays to be on Barack Obama’s good side. Since coming to office in 2009, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has agreed, against his own inclination and over the objections of his political base, to (1) recognize a Palestinian state; (2) enforce an unprecedented 10-month settlement freeze; (3) releasescores of Palestinian prisoners held on murder charges; (4) embark on an ill-starred effort to reach a final peace deal with the Palestinians; (5) refrain from taking overtmilitary steps against Iran; and (6) agree to every possible cease-fire during the summer’s war with Hamas.

In exchange, Mr. Kerry publicly blamed Israel for the failure of the peace effort, the White House held up the delivery of munitions at the height of the Gaza war, and Mr. Obama is hellbent on striking whatever deal the Iranians can plausibly offer him.

Oh, and Mr. Kerry also attributes the rise of Islamic State to the Israeli-Palestinianconflict. Maybe if the Israelis grovel a bit more, Mr. Obama will oblige them by recognizing a Palestinian state as his parting act as president. Don’t discount the possibility.

Which brings me to the concept of a trial separation.

Last year, Mustafa Alani, a Saudi foreign policy analyst, observed of Riyadh’s evolving attitude toward Washington: “We are learning from our enemies now how to treat the United States.” Sure enough it wasn’t long after the Saudis turned down a seat on the Security Council and threatened a fundamental re-evaluation of their ties to the U.S. that Messrs. Kerry and Obama went bowing and scraping to King Abdullah when they needed the kingdom’s help against ISIS.

At least the Saudis understand the value of showing they’re prepared to be, as someone once wrote, co-dependent no more. The administration likes to make much of the $3 billion a year it provides Israel (or, at least, U.S. defense contractors) in military aid, but that’s now less than 1% of Israeli GDP. Like some boorish husband of yore fond of boasting that he brings home the bacon, the administration thinks it’s the senior partner in the marriage.

Except this wife can now pay her own bills. And she never ate bacon to begin with.

It’s time for some time away. Israel needs to look after its own immediate interests without the incessant interventions of an overbearing partner. The administration needs to learn that it had better act like a friend if it wants to keep a friend. It isn’t as if it has many friends left.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com

B.Stephens: Palestine and Double Standards; The world is outraged by Israeli self-defense but only 'concerned' when Muslims kill Muslims.

What follows are excerpts from a June 30, 2014, news account by Tim Craig, the Washington Post's bureau chief in Pakistan:

"Pakistan's military launched a major ground offensive in the northwestern part of the country Monday, beginning what army commanders say will be a 'house-to-house search' for terrorist leaders and other militants.

"The offensive began after two weeks of airstrikes in North Waziristan. . . .

"In a statement, Pakistan's military said its soldiers discovered 'underground tunnels' and 'preparation factories' for explosives during the initial hours of the ground assault. . . .

"Backed by artillery and tanks, troops killed 17 terrorists Monday, the army said. Combined with the toll from airstrikes that began June 16, a total of 376 terrorists have died in the offensive, the army said. . . .

"More than a half-million residents fled North Waziristan ahead of the ground offensive. The mass evacuation of the area, which has a population of about 600,000, was intended to limit civilian casualties during the operation. The military also set up checkpoints in the area to trap militants."

***

Underground tunnels, explosives factories, weeks of airstrikes, artillery bombardment, mass displacement of civilians—leaving aside the probability that this is the first that you've heard of any of this, does it ring a familiar bell? If so, maybe the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the various self-described antiwar groups that marched near the White House on Saturday to protest Israel's military campaign in Gaza can organize another big rally outside the Pakistani embassy. No more U.S. aid to Islamabad! Boycott Pakistani products! Divest from Pakistani companies!

I'm dreaming. Over the weekend there was saturation coverage of an Israeli strike near a U.N.-run school that killed 10 people, three of them members of Islamic Jihad. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the hit "a moral outrage and a criminal act" that had to be "swiftly investigated." The State Department pronounced itself "appalled." If the Secretary-General, the Secretary of State and other arbiters of international decency have expressed themselves similarly with respect to the conduct of Pakistan's army—take a look at the picture accompanying this column to see how that one looks—I must have missed it. More than 1,500 Pakistani civilians have been reported killed since the government's offensive began in mid June.

Here's what else one might have missed in the midst of the media's saturation coverage of Gaza.

In Iraq, some 1,600 people were killed in the month of July. "I am concerned about the rising number of casualties in Iraq, particularly among the civilian population," U.N. envoy Nickolay Mladenov told the AFP. "Children and women are most vulnerable."

Note the verb. Not outraged or appalled, merely concerned.

In Syria, more than 1,800 people have been killed in just the last 10 days. On Monday, the London-based Syrian Network for Human Rights reported the deaths of "at least 130 people, including seven children and 10 women," at the hands of forces loyal to Bashar Assad.

As for the State Department, its only Syria-related press release from Monday was an announcement that it was funding a project to "document the current condition of cultural heritage sites in Syria and assess the future restoration, preservation, and protection needs for those sites."

In Libya, roughly 200 people were killed last month in artillery and rocket clashes between rival militias. Another 22 were killed over the weekend as Islamist groups attacked Tripoli's airport.

A joint statement by the governments of France, Italy, Germany, the U.K. and the U.S. noted only that "we strongly condemn the ongoing violence across the country . . . which jeopardizes the continuation of a peaceful transition and severely affects the life of the Libyan people."

In Nigeria, Boko Haram has turned its fury on Muslims who try to fight back against the jihadist group. Nearly 3,000 people have been killed so far this year, and another 500,000 have been made refugees. A spokesperson for the U.N.'s Mr. Ban issued a statement in his name, condemning Boko's attacks.

***

Since the war in Gaza began nearly a month ago, I have been bombarded with indignant letters and tweets calling me a "racist" for my views and asking whether I would like to live in Gaza.

My answer to the second point is that I would no more want to live under Hamas than I would under any other fanatical dictatorship that starts gratuitous wars, uses civilians as human shields, punishes political opposition with death, and sends others to die while its leaders hide beneath hospital sheets.

As for racism, people often point out how peculiar it is that the Jewish state seems to arouse a level of condemnation that never seems to apply equally elsewhere. But perhaps the real racism is the indifference to Muslim suffering around the world when the person dropping the bomb or pulling the trigger is another Muslim. A world that makes a fetish of the alleged guilt of Israel is also a world that holds too much Muslim life cheap.

To argue the Palestinian side, in the Gaza war, is to make the case for barbarism. Bret Stephens

Of all the inane things that have been said about the war between Israel and Hamas, surely one dishonorable mention belongs to comments made over the weekend by Benjamin J. Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications.

Interviewed by CNN's Candy Crowley, Mr. Rhodes offered the now-standard administration line that Israel has a right to defend itself but needs to do more to avoid civilian casualties. Ms. Crowley interjected that, according to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Jewish state was already doing everything it could to avoid such casualties.

"I think you can always do more," Mr. Rhodes replied. "The U.S. military does that in Afghanistan."

How inapt is this comparison? The list of Afghan civilians accidentally killed by U.S. or NATO strikes is not short. Little of the fighting in Afghanistan took place in the dense urban environments that make the current warfare in Gaza so difficult. The last time the U.S. fought a Gaza-style battle—in Fallujah in 2004—some 800 civilians perished and at least 9,000 homes were destroyed. This is not an indictment of U.S. conduct in Fallujah but an acknowledgment of the grim reality of city combat.

Oh, and by the way, American towns and cities were not being rocketed from above or tunneled under from below as the Fallujah campaign was under way.

Maybe Mr. Rhodes knows all this and was merely caught out mouthing the sorts of platitudes that are considered diplomatically de rigueur when it comes to the Palestinians. Or maybe he was just another victim of what I call the Palestine Effect: The abrupt and often total collapse of logical reasoning, skeptical intelligence and ordinary moral judgment whenever the subject of Palestinian suffering arises.

Consider the media obsession with the body count. According to a daily tally in the New York Times, as of July 27 the war in Gaza had claimed 1,023 Palestinian lives as against 46 Israelis. How does the Times keep such an accurate count of Palestinian deaths? A footnote discloses "Palestinian death tallies are provided by the Palestinian Health Ministry and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs."

OK. So who runs the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza? Hamas does. As for the U.N., it gets its data mainly from two Palestinian agitprop NGOs, one of which, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, offers the remarkably precise statistic that, as of July 27, exactly 82% of deaths in Gaza have been civilians. Curiously, during the 2008-09 Gaza war, the center also reported an 82% civilian casualty rate.

When minutely exact statistics are provided in chaotic circumstances, it suggests the statistics are garbage. When a news organization relies—without clarification—on data provided by a bureaucratic organ of a terrorist organization, there's something wrong there, too.

But let's assume for argument's sake that the numbers are accurate. Does this mean the Palestinians are the chief victims, and Israelis the main victimizers, in the conflict? By this dull logic we might want to rethink the moral equities of World War II, in which over one million German civilians perished at Allied hands compared with just 67,000 British and 12,000 American civilians.

The real utility of the body count is that it offers reporters and commentators who cite it the chance to ascribe implicit blame to Israel while evading questions about ultimate responsibility for the killing. Questions such as: Why is Hamas hiding rockets in U.N.-run schools, as acknowledged by the U.N. itself? What does it mean that Hamas has turned Gaza's central hospital into "a de facto headquarters," as reported by the Washington Post? And why does Hamas keep rejecting, or violating, cease-fires agreed to by Israel?

A reasonable person might conclude from this that Hamas, which started the war, wants it to continue, and that it relies on Israel's moral scruples not to destroy civilian sites that it cynically uses for military purposes. But then there is the Palestine Effect. By this reasoning, Hamas only initiated the fighting because Israel refused to countenance the creation of a Palestinian coalition that included Hamas, and because Israel further objected to helping pay the salaries of Hamas's civil servants in Gaza.

Let's get this one straight. Israel is culpable because (a) it won't accept a Palestinian government that includes a terrorist organization sworn to the Jewish state's destruction; (b) it won't help that organization out of its financial jam; and (c) it won't ease a quasi-blockade—jointly imposed with Egypt—on a territory whose central economic activity appears to be building rocket factories and pouring imported concrete into terrorist tunnels.

This is either bald moral idiocy or thinly veiled bigotry. It mistakes effect for cause, treats self-respect as arrogance and self-defense as aggression, and makes demands of the Jewish state that would be dismissed out of hand anywhere else. To argue the Palestinian side, in this war, is to make the case for barbarism. It is to erase, in the name of humanitarianism, the moral distinctions from which the concept of humanity arises.

Typically, the Obama administration is hedging its bets. The Palestine Effect claims another victim.

Bret Stephens - The Palestinian Blessing Israel's enemies deliver an unwitting favor.

From time to time Israel and her supporters should give thanks for having as enemies the Palestinians and their supporters.

As of midday Monday, Hamas had fired more than 1,000 missiles at Israel, aimed more or less indiscriminately, without inflicting a single Israeli fatality. It isn't every enemy whose ideological fanaticism, however great, is exceeded by its military and technological incompetence.

It's true that much of the incoming fire has been shot down mid-flight by Israel's Iron Dome, but Hamas must have seen that coming since the defense system was first deployed during the last round of fighting in 2012. It's as if the French had concluded from the Battle of Agincourt that the English long bow wasn't as effective as advertised and would surely fail against a more determined cavalry charge.

Alongside Hamas in Gaza there is the rump regime of Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank. Mr. Abbas is supposed to be a bystander in this conflict. But he made his sympathies known when, within a day or two of the fighting and with fewer than 50 Palestinian fatalities, he accused Israel of "genocide" and "war against the Palestinian people as a whole."

"Shall we recall Auschwitz?" he added.

I sometimes wonder whether supporters of the Palestinian cause—at least those capable of intellectual, if not moral, embarrassment—cringe a little at the rhetorical flourish. Bashar Assad, in whose court Palestinian leaders bowed and scraped for a decade before the current uprising, used chemical weapons against the Palestinian refugee town of Yarmouk a year ago and then starved out the remaining residents. More than a quarter-million Palestinians living in Syria for decades have also been made refugees by Mr. Assad's assaults.

An anti-Israel protest on the streets of Paris turns violent, July 13. kenzo tribouillard/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Yet last month Mr. Abbas congratulated Mr. Assad on his re-election: "Your election to the presidency of the Syrian Arab Republic guarantees Syria's unity and sovereignty," the Palestinian president groveled, "and starts a countdown to the end of Syria's crisis and its war against terrorism."

This detail, reported by AFP, seems to have escaped mainstream attention, though it remains a useful reminder of just who—and what—Mr. Abbas is.

Similarly with pro-Palestinian demonstrators marching in the civilized nations. In Paris on Sunday, one such group of demonstrators tried to lay siege to a synagogue "with bats and chairs," according to the Associated Press, trapping 150 Jewish congregants inside until police could rescue them. A day earlier, a firebomb was thrown at a synagogue in a Paris suburb. At yet another French protest there were calls for the "slaughter of the Jews." In Seattle, a Voices for Palestine rally posted signs reading "Zionist Israel=Nazi Germany." In Frankfurt, protesters held signs reading "You Jews are Beasts." Police lent the protesters a loudspeaker, ostensibly to "de-escalate the situation," according to the Jerusalem Post.

Maybe the Presbyterian Church, USA, which last month voted to divest from companies doing business with Israel, will issue a statement of concern. But don't count on it.

All of which, as I say, is a blessing for Israel and her supporters.

If you must have a nemesis, better it be a stupid one. If your adversary has an undeserved reputation for moderation and sincerity, better that he should give his own extremism and hypocrisy away. If you are going to be the object of mass protests and calumny, better to be hated by the worst than by the best. Israel's enemies continuously indict themselves, whether or not the rest of the world has the wit to see it.

What if it were otherwise? It has always been something of a surprise to me that Israel's enemies and critics have usually been too consumed by their own hatred to spot, or exploit, the Jewish state's most obvious weakness. This is not the narrowness of its borders, or the fractiousness of its politics, or its vulnerability to atomic attack, or this or that ticking demographic bomb, whether of the Palestinian, Israeli-Arab or ultra-Orthodox variety.

The real weakness is a certain kind of vanity that confuses stainlessness with virtue, favors moral self-regard over normal self-interest, and believes in politics as an exercise not in power but in self-examination. People, and nations, with such attitudes cannot be beaten militarily. But they can easily—too easily—be shamed. Witness the outpouring of national self-reproach following this month's murder of a Palestinian teenager by Jewish assailants. The killing was appalling, but it took Hamas's missiles to prevent it from turning into an excruciating morality play.

It may someday be that Palestinians will wise up; that the next intifada, should it come, will be Gandhian in its methods and philosophy; that the next Palestinian leader will be in the mold of Vaclav Havel, not Fidel Castro. In the face of that kind of movement, Israeli resistance to a Palestinian state would crumble.

But that's not the direction in which Palestine is going. Every Hamas missile and every barbaric protest is a reminder that the supreme purpose of Israel is to defend its people, not flatter them.

How Not to Negotiate With Iran The threat of force will do far more than gifts and sweet talk. By BRET STEPHENS

We know that deception is part of [Iran's] DNA." So said Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman last week, testifying to Congress about the next round of negotiations with Tehran over its nuclear programs. So why is Ms. Sherman pleading with Congress to delay imposing additional sanctions for the sake of what she called "confidence building"?

How depressingly predictable: Iran lies and prevaricates—about the breadth of its nuclear programs; about their purpose; about the quality of its cooperation with U.N. nuclear watchdogs; about its record of sponsoring terrorism from Argentina to Bulgaria to Washington, D.C.; about its efforts to topple Arab governments (Bahrain) or colonize them (Lebanon); about its role in the butchery of Syria; about its official attitude toward the Holocaust—and the administration thinks priority No. 1 is proving its own good faith.

Last month, the administration returned to Iran a 2,700-year-old silver cup shaped like a mythological griffin, which had been stolen from a cave in Iran a decade ago before it was seized by U.S. customs. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei must have been moved to tears.

At least the griffin beat the key-shaped cake National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane brought with him in the 1980s in what would become the Iran-Contra debacle. That episode provides a useful lesson in how not to negotiate with Iran, and from the most unexpected source: Hasan Rouhani, now Iran's president, then deputy chairman of the Majlis, the Islamic Republic's parliament.

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Jason DeCrow/Associated Press

Secretary of State John Kerry meets with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif (far right) at the United Nations, Sept. 26.

In August 1986, an Israeli agent named Amiram Nir, posing as a U.S. official, met Mr. Rouhani in Paris at a meeting orchestrated by an Iranian-born arms dealer named Manucher Ghorbanifar. Nir wore a recording device, and details of the talk eventually came into the possession of Israeli military reporter Ron Ben-Yishai. The episode has since been reprised in the Israeli press, most recently by reporter Mitch Ginsburg for the Times of Israel.

Iran was then trying to obtain missiles from the U.S. (with Israel acting as an intermediary) in exchange for the release of Americans held hostage by Iranian-backed proxies in Lebanon.

The missiles were provided but the hostages were not—a victim, by some accounts, of hard-line opposition within Iran to the more pliable course advocated by Mr. Rouhani. So it goes with Western outreach to Iranian moderates: It always fails, though whether it's on account of the moderates being duplicitous or powerless is a matter of debate. Maybe Mr. Rouhani isn't "a wolf in sheep's clothing," as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says. Maybe he's a sheep among wolves.

If so, he's a very canny sheep. "If you don't bare sharp teeth before [Ayatollah] Khomeini," he advised Nir, "you're going to have troubles all over the world. If you threaten him with military force, he'll kiss your hand and run."

Elsewhere in the conversation, Mr. Rouhani suggested a strategy for getting the hostages released. "If for instance, you said to [Khomeini], 'You must release all of the hostages in Lebanon within five days. If not—we'll deal you a military blow and you will be responsible for the results,' do it, show that you are strong, and you will see results."

And there was this: "If we analyze Khomeini's character, we will see that if someone strong stands opposite him, he will retreat 100 steps; and if he is strong and someone weak faces him, he will advance 100 steps. Unfortunately, you have taken a mistaken approach. You have been soft to him. Had you been tougher, your hand would be on top."

Mr. Rouhani's analysis of Khomeini's mind-set would soon find tragic confirmation. On July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes mistook an Iranian jetliner for a fighter jet and shot it down, killing nearly 300 people. Khomeini, who was sure the incident was no accident, thought Washington intended to enter the Iran-Iraq war on Saddam Hussein's side. Just 17 days later, on July 20, Khomeini accepted a humiliating cease-fire with Iraq: "Unhappy am I that I still survive and have drunk the poisoned chalice," he said in a radio address.

Khomeini is long dead, but the regime's mentality of yielding only to intense pressure and credible threats of force remains the same. So how should the U.S. negotiate? Mark Dubowitz, who helped design some of the most effective sanctions against Iran from his perch at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, offered this:

"Effective on October 16, any financial institution providing Iran with access to, or use of, its overseas financial reserves for any purpose with the exception of permissible humanitarian trade will be cut off from the U.S. financial system." The idea is to push forward what Mr. Dubowitz calls Iran's "economic cripple date"—the moment when it runs out of foreign reserves—ahead of its "undetectable breakout date"—the moment when the regime can build a bomb in secret before the West can stop it.

I have my doubts about the use of sanctions as the main tool to change Iran's behavior. But if the administration means to use them as the weapon of choice, they should at least use them aggressively. Negotiations with Iran resume Oct. 15. Mr. Dubowitz's Oct. 16 deadline will do more to get their attention than griffins, cakes or other pathetic diplomatic sweeteners.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com

BRET STEPHENS: Israel's Failing Strategy The Jewish state cannot rely on the United States for its security

So Israel's prime minister is now left to play the part of querulous Uncle Ben, who arrives the day after the funeral convinced his scheming siblings have already absconded with mother's finest jewelry.

Uncle Ben's suspicions may well be right. But he largely has himself to blame for not acting in time.

Benjamin Netanyahu visited the White House on Monday and on Tuesday addresses the United Nations. It's a predictable routine. First he obtains the stylized assurances from President Obama—still exulting from his 15 minute phone call Friday with Iran's Hasan Rouhani—that Iran will not be allowed to get a bomb and that "all options are on the table." Then Mr. Netanyahu denounces Iran at the U.N. and issues unspecified, and increasingly noncredible, warnings that Israel may act on its own.

All hat and no cattle, as they say.

Here's a line I never thought I'd write: I wish Ehud Olmert were Israel's prime minister. Mr. Olmert has many flaws, some of them well known. But he also had a demonstrated capacity to act. It isn't clear that Mr. Netanyahu does.

In May 2007 Israel disclosed to the U.S. that Syria was constructing a nuclear reactor in its eastern desert with help from North Korea. Mr. Olmert, then Israel's prime minister, asked President Bush to bomb the facility. Mr. Bush weighed the options, said no, and proposed instead taking the matter public at the U.N.

"I told [Mr. Olmert] I had decided on a diplomatic option backed by the threat of force," the former president recounts in his memoir, "Decision Points."

"The prime minister was disappointed. 'This is something that hits at the very serious nerves of this country,' he said. He told me the threat of a nuclear weapons program in Syria was an 'existential' issue for Israel, and he worried diplomacy would bog down and fail. 'I must be honest and sincere with you. Your strategy is very disturbing to me.' That was the end of the call."

Could Mr. Netanyahu say the same to Mr. Obama? Maybe. The Israeli prime minister infuriated the White House a couple of years ago by treating the president to a public lecture in the Oval Office.

Yet Israeli policy since then has amounted to one big kowtow to Mr. Obama's needs, political and diplomatic. Israel apparently refrained from attacking Iran a year ago, largely out of deference to Mr. Obama's electoral needs. Since then it has given the administration the widest possible latitude to pursue diplomatic initiatives until they prove their futility.

A year on, here is where things stand.

(1) U.S. credibility on enforcing presidential red lines and carrying through on military threats is in tatters thanks to Mr. Obama's Syria capitulation.

(2) America's "diplomatic option" is, for Mr. Obama, a journey not a destination: He will pursue it no matter how flimsy the pretext or the likelihood of success.

(3) Iran has enriched nearly 3,000 kilos of uranium in the last year alone, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The IAEA also notes in its most recent report that "the Agency has become increasingly concerned about the possible existence in Iran of undisclosed nuclear related activities . . . including activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile."

Oh, and (4): Despite this, Israel finds itself on the diplomatic back foot because Iran's new president, unlike his predecessor, has alighted on a less-uncouth way to deny the Holocaust. Israel is now in the disastrous position of having to hope that Iranian hard-liners sabotage Mr. Rouhani's efforts to negotiate a deal that, if honored, would leave Iran first-and-five at the nuclear goal line.

How does Mr. Netanyahu get out of this trap? Here's another line I never thought I'd write: by downgrading relations with Washington.

That isn't to say that Israel doesn't benefit from good relations with the U.S. But the U.S., like Britain after World War II, is in retreat from the world, and Israelis need to adapt to a global reality in which the Americans are willing to do less, and consequently count for less. What Mr. Netanyahu has been doing instead is granting Mr. Obama a degree of leverage and a presumption of authority over the Jewish state to which he is not entitled and has done little to deserve. That needs to stop.

What also needs to stop is the guessing game over Israel's intentions toward Iran. Mr. Obama will not—repeat, will not—conduct a military strike against Iran. Israelis who think otherwise are fooling themselves.

But Israel will soon have to decide whether to act alone. If so, Israelis must proceed without regard to Mr. Obama's diplomatic timetable. If not, they'll need to reconsider the concept and structure of Israeli deterrence, including nuclear ambiguity.

One last thing worth noting: Reflecting on Mr. Olmert's decision to act against his wishes, Mr. Bush wrote this: "Prime Minister Olmert's execution of the strike made up for the confidence I had lost in the Israelis during the Lebanon war. . . . The bombing demonstrated Israel's willingness to act alone. Prime Minister Olmert hadn't asked for a green light, and I hadn't given one. He had done what he believed was necessary to protect Israel."

That is the voice of respect. Better for Israel to have that than any other mark of international approval or popularity.

BRET STEPHENS: WHOSE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR…??? **** By Ruth King

My Rock of Gibraltar (Not Yours)

Sure, Britain should give the rock back to the Spanish. But why stop there?

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Francis Drake setting sail from Plymouth to fight the Spanish Armada it was not. Yet on Monday the British press ran heavy with images of the helicopter carrier HMS Illustrious leaving Portsmouth Naval Base, destination Gibraltar. Madrid is kicking up a fuss, again, over the Rock they have coveted ever since ceding it to Britain “for ever” in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht. And London, says the Times of London, “is drawing up plans to take unprecedented legal action against Spain for imposing additional checks at the Gibraltar border.”

I’m sympathetic to the Spanish claim. Rather than waste time and money on a fruitless diplomatic brawl, Prime Minister David Cameron should say he’s prepared to relinquish Gibraltar to Spain—on just one condition.

That would be a declaration by the Spanish government that it will renounce its own claims to the cities of Ceuta and Melilla, which lie opposite Gibraltar on the northern coast of Africa. Morocco has long claimed these Spanish enclaves for itself, and in July 2002 it even sent troops to seize an uninhabited Spanish islet near Ceuta. Madrid responded a week later by deploying its navy, air force and special forces to bloodlessly retake the island, but tensions still simmer.

Spaniards might object to returning the two cities on the grounds that local inhabitants overwhelmingly consider themselves Spanish and wish to remain a part of Spain. Then again, the last time Gibraltarians took a vote on their sovereignty, 99% of them wished to remain British.

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Of course, Madrid couldn’t just turn over Ceuta and Melilla without asking Morocco to readjust its own territorial claims. Since 1975, Rabat has occupied the Western Sahara—a territory larger than the U.K.—though no other country recognizes Moroccan sovereignty. The Moroccan position is contested by an Algerian-backed group called the Polisario Front, which administers a “country” called the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.

But the leadership in Rabat could hardly be asked to deliver such a political prize to its arch-rivals in Algiers without expecting some commensurate sacrifice.

It’s been more than 50 years since Algerian independence led to the exodus of nearly one million pieds-noirs and the seizure of their properties by Ben Bella’s government. And though the French government did pay some small indemnities to their displaced kinsmen, the Algerian government has never recognized, much less atoned for, the injustice it did to an indigenous community that had considered itself Algerian for generations.

If Algiers were to compensate each pied-noir (or a descendent) to the tune of $10,000, in 1962 dollars, for the emotional pain and economic loss of losing a homeland, it would cost Algeria about $74 billion, which is the equivalent of a year’s worth of its export earnings from oil and gas. It’s a small price to pay, morally speaking, for the sake of the pieds-noirs and the glorious independence of Western Sahara.

Now it would be Paris’s turn to make good. Independence for the Pacific outpost of New Caledonia, perhaps, or the South American one of French Guiana? Restoration of the Port of Calais to the English crown?

The possibilities are intriguing, but what clearly makes the most sense is to restore Alsace, and maybe Lorraine too, to Germany.

There are several good reasons for this: Most of the territory was German-speaking before World War I, after which it was seized by France as part of the Carthaginian Peace of Versailles. The European Union has dissolved national borders anyway, so return of the territories would symbolically signal the overcoming of past nationalist rivalries.

And, let’s face it, the French will need a bailout from Berlin eventually, so they may as well make a down payment now. I’m betting the typical Frenchman these days cares more about the security of his pension than he does about the language on the label for his Muscat d’Alsace.

As for the Germans, it won’t do to point out that they’ve paid into every Holocaust reparation fund, or that they’re carrying Greek civil servants, Portuguese pensioners and Spanish bankers on their financial backs. There is still the Schleswig-Holstein Question! Just because the world has forgotten what the question was doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten that there was a question. Or that Schleswig-Holstein used to belong to Denmark until Bismarck seized it in 1864.

Yes, it’s time to give it back—and pay it forward. Only then will the Danes be able to restore full sovereignty to Greenland. And only when Greenland is truly free will it be able to atone for Björk. Or is she from Iceland? Whatever. Greenland must have been guilty of something at some time, and they will pay. Somewhere down this line, Orange County secedes from California, English becomes the sole official language of Quebec, the Byzantines are restored to Constantinople, and Al Gore wins the Florida recount.

Alternatively, maybe Gibraltar should just remain British.

The Boring Palestinians If this were a TV drama, it would be 'The X-Files' in its 46th season. By BRET STEPHENS

Sufian Abu Zaida is a well-known Palestinian nationalist who worked closely with Yasser Arafat and sits on the Fatah Revolutionary Council, the ostensible legislative branch of the Palestinian Authority's ostensible ruling party. Though he spent years in Israeli prison on terrorism charges, he has long been considered a relative moderate for his participation in various peace initiatives.

These days Mr. Abu Zaida is an unhappy camper, but not because of the Israelis.

"Honestly, no one ever dreamt we would reach this situation of concentration of authorities and senior positions in the hands of one person," he wrote about Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in a recent op-ed published on several Palestinian websites.

"The President today is the President of everything that has to do with the Palestinian people and the Palestinian cause. He is the president of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the State of Palestine and the Palestinian Authority. He is the president of the Fatah movement and general leader of the [security] Forces. And as the legislative council is now suspended, he issues laws and has practically replaced the council."

Mr. Abu Zaida goes on to complain of the pervasive toadyism among Palestinian ministers and officials, their "impotence and fear" in the face of Mr. Abbas's every decision and appointment. "One of the main reasons that made President Abbas a natural candidate after President Arafat passed away is that many had thought Abbas's management would be different than Arafat's," he notes. Yet now the president "holds authorities that Arafat in all his greatness and symbolic importance didn't hold."

Oh, well: Just another aging strongman in another squalid Mideast dictatorship. What else is new? It isn't going to keep John Kerry—a fool on a fool's errand—from making his sixth visit in as many months to try to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. It won't keep the Palestinian Chorus from its weekly hymnals of pity and cant.

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nabil mounzer/European Pressphoto Agency

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

And yet for all its presumed importance, the Palestinian saga has gotten awfully boring, hasn't it? The grievances that remain unchanged, a cast of characters that never alters, the same schematics, the clichés that were shopworn decades ago. If it were a TV drama, it would be "The X-Files"—in its 46th season. The truth is out there. Still. We get it. We just don't give a damn anymore.

Little wonder that when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was interviewed over the weekend by CBS's Bob Schieffer, the topics were Iran, Egypt and Syria, with no mention of Palestinians. Granted, news is a fickle business and what bleeds leads, but the omission was telling all the same. The region is moving tumultuously forward. Israel is dynamic, threatened, divided, innovative, evolving. Egypt careens between revolution and restoration. Lebanon is on the brink, Iran is on the march, Syria is in its agony. America is beating a retreat.

Only the Palestinians remain trapped in ideological amber. How long can the world be expected to keep staring at this four-million-year-old mosquito?

For the usual stalwarts and diehards, the answer will always be: as long as it takes. Palestinians will say it's on account of their supposedly unique experience of injustice and oppression. Professional peace processors think it's because of the supposed centrality of the Palestinian drama to all other Middle Eastern conflicts. The Israeli left and its sympathizers in the West are convinced that Palestine is the key to Israel's survival as a Jewish and democratic state.

All of which is stale bread. Take the most jaundiced view of Israeli behavior toward the Palestinians over the past dozen years: Does it hold a candle to what Bashar Assad does in any given week to his own people in Homs and Aleppo? Take the most exaggerated view of the dearness of Palestine to Egyptians on the streets of Cairo or Turks in the squares of Istanbul: How does their sympathy for Gaza compare with their outrage toward their own governments?

As for the view that Israel needs to separate itself from Palestinians for its own good, that's as true as it is beside the point. The issue for Israel isn't whether it has a theoretical interest in a Palestinian state. It does.

But everything hinges on whether such a state evolves into another Costa Rica—or descends into another Yemen. So far the evidence points toward Yemen. Is it any wonder that, given the choice between a long-term moral threat to their character as a state and a near-term physical threat to their existence as a nation, ordinary Israelis should be more concerned with the latter?

Two days after the publication of Mr. Abu Zaida's op-ed, WAFA, the official Palestinian news agency, carried a rebuttal signed only by "The Security Establishment." It denounced Mr. Abu Zaida for serving "a foreign agenda" and being a tool of "enemy media." Then it sang Mr. Abbas's praises in a style worthy of Egyptian state media under Hosni Mubarak.

It was a characteristically thuggish performance, which unwittingly proved Mr. Abu Zaida's point. If Palestinians want to be interesting again, and worthy of decent respect, they could start by not playing to tin-pot type.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com