WSJ: The Truth About Gaza I was wrong to support Israel's 'disengagement' from the Strip in 2005. by Bret Stephens

Sometimes it behooves even a pundit to acknowledge his mistakes. In 2004 as editor of the Jerusalem Post, and in 2006 in this column, I made the case that Israel was smart to withdraw its soldiers and settlers from the Gaza Strip. I was wrong.  My error was to confuse a good argument with good policy; to suppose that mere self-justification is a form of strategic prudence. It isn't.

And he added:

The diplomatic and public-relations benefit Israel derives from being able to defend itself from across a “border” and without having to get into an argument about settlements isn’t worth the price Israelis have had to pay in lives and terror...

 ...the reality of post-occupation Gaza do much to dent the appetite of the Obama administration for yet another effort to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace. That included a settlement freeze in the West Bank (observed by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, to zero benefit) and calls by President Obama for Israel to withdraw to its 1967 lines “with mutually agreed swaps.”
In 2009, Hillary Clinton disavowed the Bush-Sharon exchange of letters...

...Put simply, Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza yielded less security, greater diplomatic isolation, and a Palestinian regime even more radical and emboldened than it had been before. As strategic failures go, it was nearly perfect.

...Israel can afford to watch only so many reruns of this same, sordid show.

How many other editors and journalists are as wise?

WSJ: Where Is the Flotilla for Syria? Assad's war has claimed four times as many victims in 20 months as have been killed in the Israel-Palestine conflict in the last 20 years. By RON PROSOR

Last month, a group of Scandinavians pulled up anchor from a Swedish port and set off toward the Middle East under the pretense of delivering humanitarian aid. The Nordic fog may have clouded their choice of destination. The moral compass of these self-proclaimed human-rights activists steered them to the Gaza Strip, not Syria.

The fleets of flotillas, ferries, yachts, sailboats, canoes and catamarans and that have set sail for Gaza in recent years rival the size of the Spanish Armada. Yet one might argue that humanitarian flotillas are needed just a bit more urgently in Syria, where more civilians have been murdered by the Assad regime than those killed during Japan's 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and 9/11 combined.

The conflict in Syria has also claimed roughly four times as many victims in the past 20 months as were killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the past 20 years. The residents of Gaza continue to enjoy more international assistance than virtually any other population on the planet, but almost no aid is reaching the two million people displaced within Syria—roughly 10% of the country's population.

The flotilla crowd has different priorities. They prefer to work around the clock to protest Israel's legitimate defense against the terrorists who target its citizens and fire thousands of rockets into its cities. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised: It's much easier to face news cameras in Tel Aviv than bullets in Damascus.

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Reuters/Bob Strong

Demonstrators at an anti-Israel rally in Stockholm, May 2010.

Indeed, Israel is the luxury destination of choice for this type of "human-rights activist." In Israel, these weekend revolutionaries are free from the dangers of arbitrary arrest, imprisonment and execution that abound in the totalitarian states that make up the rest of the region. Instead of trying to dig into the dark abyss of abuses in neighboring states, they prefer to lounge in the comfort of Israel's democratic institutions, civil society and independent media, which offer a wealth of easily accessible information that they use to attack Israel.

The burden of democracy is always heavy, and Israel is proud to carry it. With more reporters and human-rights activists per capita than anywhere else on the planet, we understand deeply the invaluable role of civil society, even though its institutions can sometimes be used and abused by those with the most radical of agendas.

Today much of the international human-rights arena resembles a masquerade ball, where the most extreme views can be easily masked beneath the empty utterance of words like "democracy" and "human rights." Norwegian scholar Johan Galtung, the leader of the Scandinavian ship to Gaza, was recently suspended from the Swiss World Peace Academy for a series of anti-Semitic rants. He recommended that all university students read "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the infamous piece of 19th-century propaganda used in Nazi classrooms.

Far from criticizing the tyrants of the Middle East, the flotilla crowd often joins hands with them. Just this May, the British activist group Viva Palestina enjoyed the hospitality of Bashar Assad, making a pit stop in Syria on its way to trying to enter Gaza. Around the same time that Assad's thugs were gearing up for their massacre of children in Houla, members of Viva Palestina were proudly tweeting their whereabouts and posting photos on Facebook of themselves next to the regime's representatives.

Instead of dancing with dictators and tangoing with tyrants, what if the flotilla crowd actually set sail in the direction where aid is so desperately needed?

—Mr. Prosor is Israel's ambassador to the United Nations.

WSJ: An Anti-Israel President The president's peace proposal is a formula for war. by BRET STEPHENS

Say what you will about President Obama's approach to Israel—or of his relationship with American Jews—he sure has mastered the concept of chutzpah.

On Thursday at the State Department, the president gave his big speech on the Middle East, in which he invoked the claims of friendship to tell Israelis "the truth," which to his mind was that "the status quo is unsustainable, and Israel too must act boldly to advance a lasting peace." On Friday in the Oval Office, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered his version of the truth, which was that the 1967 border proposed by Mr. Obama as a basis for negotiating the outlines of a Palestinian state was a nonstarter.
Administration reaction to this reciprocal act of friendly truth-telling? "That was Bibi over the top," the New York Times quoted one senior U.S. official, using the prime minister's nickname. "That's not how you address the president of the United States."
Maybe so. Then again, it isn't often that this or any other U.S. president welcomes a foreign leader by sandbagging him with an adversarial policy speech a day before the visit. Remember when the Dalai Lama visited Mr. Obama last year? As a courtesy to Beijing, the president made sure to have the Tibetan spiritual leader exit by the door where the White House trash was piled up. And that was 11 months before Hu Jintao's state visit to the U.S.
When this president wants to make a show of his exquisite diplomatic sensitivity—burgers with Medvedev, bows to Abdullah, New Year's greetings to the mullahs—he knows how. And when he wants to show his contempt, he knows how, too.
The contempt was again on display Sunday, when Mr. Obama spoke to the Aipac policy conference in Washington. The speech was stocked with the perennial bromides about U.S.-Israeli friendship, which brought an anxious crowd to its feet a few times. As for the rest, it was a thin tissue of falsehoods, rhetorical legerdemain, telling omissions and self-contradictions. Let's count the ways.
For starters, it would be nice if the president could come clean about whether his line about the 1967 line—"mutually agreed swaps" and all—was pathbreaking and controversial, or no big deal. On Sunday, Mr. Obama congratulated himself for choosing the hard road to Mideast peace as he prepares for re-election, only to offer a few minutes later that "there was nothing particularly original in my proposal."

Yet assuming Mr. Obama knows what he's talking about, he knows that's untrue: No U.S. president has explicitly endorsed the '67 lines as the basis for negotiating a final border, which is why the University of Michigan's Juan Cole, not exactly a shill for the Israel lobby, called it "a major turning point."

Mr. Obama would also know that in 2009 Hillary Clinton had described this formula as "the Palestinian goal." Now it's Mr. Obama's goal as well, even as he insists that "no peace can be imposed."
Then there was Mr. Obama's use of his favorite professorial trope: "Let me repeat what I actually said." What followed was a rehearsal of what he supposedly said on Thursday.
But Mr. Obama's problem isn't, as he supposes, that people aren't paying close enough attention to him. On the contrary, they've noticed that on Thursday Mr. Obama called for Israel to make territorial concessions to some approximation of the '67 lines before an agreement is reached on the existential issues of refugees and Jerusalem. "Moving forward now on the basis of territory and security," he said, "provides a foundation to resolve these two issues in a way that is just and fair, and that respects the rights and aspirations of Israelis and Palestinians."
Mr. Obama neglected to mention these points on Sunday, hence the telling omission. But the essence of his proposal is that Israel should cede territory, put itself into a weaker position, and then hope for the best. This doesn't even amount to a land-for-peace formula.
That's not all. Mr. Obama got some applause Sunday by calling for a "non-militarized" Palestinian state. But how does that square with his comment, presumably applicable to a future Palestine, that "every state has a right to self-defense"? Mr. Obama was also cheered for his references to Israel as a "Jewish state." But why then obfuscate on the question of Palestinian refugees, whose political purpose over 63 years has been to destroy Israel as a Jewish state?
And then there was that line that "we will hold the Palestinians accountable for their actions and their rhetoric." Applause! But can Mr. Obama offer a single example of having done that as president, except perhaps at the level of a State Department press release?
What, then, would a pro-Israel president do? He would tell Palestinians that there is no right of return. He would make the reform of the Arab mindset toward Israel the centerpiece of his peace efforts. He would outline hard and specific consequences should Hamas join the government.
Such a vision could lay the groundwork for peace. What Mr. Obama offered is a formula for war, one that he will pursue in a second term. Assuming, of course, that he gets one.

The 1967 Line of Fire - Obama creates a needless furor over Israel's borders;President Obama's address Thursday on the Middle East had much to recommend it, so it's a pity that he stepped all over his own headline by diving back into the Israel-Palestinian maelstrom

Mr. Obama went to the State Department to offer a mostly inspiring vision of U.S. policy amid the political upheavals sweeping the region. But all attention is now focused on the coda he offered about the Arab-Israeli conflict, in which he said that "the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines." Though he immediately added that those lines should be adjusted "with mutually agreed swaps" of territory "so that secure and recognized borders are established for both parties," it's the 1967 line that is sticking.

And with good reason. At its neck, the distance from the Mediterranean coast to the West Bank is nine miles. Foreign analysts may imagine that strategic depth no longer matters, but Israelis know better thanks to the thousands of short-range rockets fired at their towns from Hamas-controlled Gaza. As candidate Obama said when he toured one such Israeli town in 2008, "If someone was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that, and I would expect Israelis to do the same thing."

Well, exactly. Which is why it was strange to hear Mr. Obama, in a speech otherwise devoted to urging change in the nature of Arab societies, suddenly revert to the tired land-for-peace formula that has so often failed. Since the rest of Mr. Obama's speech borrowed heavily from President Bush's Freedom Agenda, he might also have taken a cue from his predecessor's June 2002 speech, which conditioned Palestinian statehood on renouncing terrorism and liberalizing politics.

That concept is all the more appropriate now that Hamas has joined the Palestinian government, a point Mr. Obama acknowledged in his speech. Most Israelis would not object to a Palestinian state, even on the 1967 lines, if its politics resembled those of, say, Canada. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's problem is that political trends among the Palestinians lean more in the direction of Iran, despite some recent promising economic trends.

Nor does it help that Mr. Obama wants Israel to withdraw from Palestinian territory even before the two sides resolve the issues of the status of Jerusalem and of the 1948 Palestinian refugees, recently in the news with their attempt to force their way through Israel's borders. No Israeli leader is going to give up the West Bank without resolving those existential issues, since it would merely allow the Palestinians to pocket the territorial gains while perpetuating the conflict.

The President's team is explaining the speech as an attempt to restart the moribund Israeli-Palestinian talks, but it will accomplish no such thing. It's more accurate to say he obscured the important substance of his speech by needlessly raising an irrelevant and neuralgic subject. He provided Palestinian hardliners with a negotiating line that will become totemic to them and their sympathizers in the years ahead, no matter what happens on the ground.

He also alienated the leader of a key U.S. ally, as yesterday's chilly photo-op of the President with Prime Minister Netanyahu made clear. If this is what Hillary Clinton likes to call "smart diplomacy," we'd hate to see what qualifies as dumb.

'The Third Intifada' - Back to the future in the Middle East.

Sunday's coordinated attacks on the Israeli border mark a dangerous turn back toward Mideast conflict. Such a coda to the Arab Spring would be cheered only by Iran, Arab dictators and Islamists. And as perennial pawns in games played by stronger Muslim players, the Palestinians will suffer the worst consequences.

On the day that Palestinians call "nakba," or catastrophe, which follows the day Israelis celebrate their independence, thousands rushed military checkpoints in the Golan Heights, Gaza, Jordan and Lebanon. More than a dozen people were killed. Protestors also sought to break into the Israeli embassy in Cairo.

The usual suspects in the West are calling this a Palestinian version of the Arab Spring, but it looks more like the familiar violence of rock-throwing at Israeli conscripts. Then there's the role of Syria's Bashar Assad, otherwise engaged in murdering domestic opponents. Syria's regime engineered the worst clashes in the previously quiet Golan to distract attention from his own troubles.

Most of the Palestinians were bused to the border from two camps controlled by factions friendliest to the Assad regime. Syrian border guards, who since the 1974 truce have kept anyone on their side far from the frontier, let the arrivals rush through. The attacks in Gaza, Jordan and Lebanon were not as well organized as in Syria. Jordanian and Egyptian security pushed the Palestinians back.

President Assad faces the gravest challenge to his family's 40 year hold on Syria, and though too weak to fight Israel himself, he would certainly benefit from a change of subject in the region. Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas—Iran's terrorist proxies to Israel's south and north—are always spoiling for a fight with Israel.

As ominously, Egypt's post-Mubarak elites are brushing up on their Nasser-style nationalism and anti-Israel populism. Some of the leaders who helped mobilize the protesters on Tahrir Square joined in calls for a "Third Intifada"—this time bringing the whole Arab world, not just the Palestinians, together against Israel. Secular groups have joined with the Muslim Brotherhood in demonstrations outside the Israeli embassy in Cairo.

The Arab Spring began as an effort by Arab publics to reform their own sclerotic politics. Rather than invoke the usual bogies of America or Israel, Arabs rose up against domestic injustice and talked of promoting more widely shared prosperity. If they now retreat to blaming Israel for all of their problems, the uprising in the streets will be for naught.

The 1993 Oslo peace agreement put Palestinians in charge of the West Bank and Gaza strip. Corruption, terror, authoritarianism and stagnation were the result, particularly in Hamas-run Gaza. Fatah did better in the West Bank after Yasser Arafat died in 2004. But its unity deal with Hamas earlier this month, brokered by Egypt, puts them back in bed with a group that vows to destroy Israel. As long as Israel is threatened by a terrorist entity next door, an independent Palestine won't be established through negotiations.

President Obama plans to deliver a major speech on the Middle East Thursday, and he could help by saying candidly that this latest Arab turn is self-defeating. At a moment of great hope for a changed Arab world, nothing would be as destructive as a fourth Mideast war.

WSJ: Mr. Goldstone Recants Now the U.N. author says he didn't have the facts when he accused Israel of war crimes in Gaza

Regrets, Richard Goldstone has a few, if you can believe it. The principal author of the U.N. Human Rights Council's notorious "fact-finding mission" report on the Gaza war of 2008-09 now concedes he didn't have enough facts when he equated Israel with Hamas in deliberately targeting innocents.

The South African jurist delivered his mea culpa in a Washington Post op-ed that is astonishing for its self-justifying apologetics. In his September 2009 report, Mr. Goldstone and his U.N. comrades took 575 pages to denounce Israel for "a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population," and that Israeli soldiers should be held criminally liable for prosecution in international courts. Hamas endorsed the report and the Financial Times praised it as "balanced" and "damning" in regard to Israel.

Now, Mr. Goldstone says, "If I had known then what I know now," his report "would have been a different document." What revelations have since come his way?

Well, it turns out that Israel didn't deliberately target innocents, and that its military and courts are doing a thorough and conscientious job of investigating cases in which civilians in Gaza were accidentally killed. Oh, and he now regrets that "that there has been no effort by Hamas in Gaza" to investigate its own acts of terror in aiming hundreds of missiles at Israeli cities.

We would welcome this apologia if we didn't think a jurist of Mr. Goldstone's stature should have known the difference between a democracy like Israel with a history of investigating its own failings under the rule of law, and a self-avowed terrorist state like the one Hamas runs in Gaza. "Hundreds more rockets and mortar rounds have been directed at civilian targets in southern Israel," Mr. Goldstone now concedes in stating the obvious, which at least proves he wants to retain a shred of his former reputation.

As our friends at the New York Sun note, Mr. Goldstone should now have the decency to retire from public life.

Israel Is Resilient but Watchful - Amid the return of Palestinian violence and upheaval in the Arab world, there is broad consensus on issues such as land for peace.

The ambulance sirens began sounding and didn't seem to end. The terrorist attack on March 23 that killed one person and wounded 30 was the first bus bombing in Jerusalem since 2005. And it happened just as missiles from Gaza began falling on Israeli cities and towns for the first time since the Gaza War of 2009. Suddenly it was as if the normal life we'd since managed to re-inhabit was an illusion.

But the despair passed quickly. Two days after the bombing, 10,000 people—from as far away as Kenya, Ethiopia and Poland—jogged through Jerusalem in the city's first-ever international marathon. Residents lined the streets, cheering on the runners. Not one participant dropped out as a result of the bombing.

After a brutal decade that began with the collapse of the peace process in September 2000, and which brought four years of suicide bombings, eight years of missile attacks, two wars, and at least two failed attempts at peacemaking, the Israeli public is resilient and sober. As terrorism and rocket attacks return to Israeli cities, and the Arab world reels, those are precisely the qualities Israelis need to cope.

The precondition for containing terrorism is national unity, and on security matters at least, the nation is cohesive. In responding to attacks on civilian Israel, the government has the support of nearly every party. Knesset members of the opposition Kadima party are demanding that the government respond even more firmly—the left pressing the right to be resolute.

Yet so far the government's response has been restrained—and rightly so. Another Israeli-Hamas confrontation is perhaps inevitable, but not now. As the Arab world finally begins to face itself, Israel must avoid focusing the region's attention on the Palestinian conflict. The upheavals have proven that what preoccupies the Arab peoples aren't Israel's actions but Arab failures. The dictators want to deflect their people's rage back onto Israel. Moammar Gadhafi, for instance, has urged Palestinians to board ships and descend on Israel's coast.

This is also not the time for far-reaching political initiatives. With the open question of whether Israel's peace with Egypt will survive the fall of Hosni Mubarak, Israelis are reassessing the wisdom of land-for-peace agreements with dictators. What is the point, many here wonder, of exchanging the Golan Heights for a dubious peace with a Baathist regime run by the hated Allawite minority?

Israelis are asking a similar question about Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, who is widely resented by Palestinians as corrupt and represents at best only part of his people. Why negotiate a land for peace agreement with an unelected, one-party government? Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad is the first Palestinian leader to place economic growth before ideology, but he lacks a political base. In a time of regional change, Israelis are even more reluctant to risk irreversible strategic concessions for a deal that may well lack popular legitimacy.

There is no basis now for an agreement. Claims in the media that Mr. Abbas and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert were close to a deal are merely another example of the wishful thinking that once turned the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat into a partner for peace. Recently leaked documents from the Palestinian Authority reveal that Palestinian leaders continue to anticipate the "return" of hundreds of thousands of refugee descendants to Israel. No Israeli government will concede on what is, for the Jewish state, an existential issue.

In the coming months, pressure to implement an immediate two-state solution will increase—from the United Nations, the European Union, and the Obama administration. Israel must resist that pressure. The premature creation of a Palestinian state—more precisely two states, ruled by the competing autocracies of Hamas and Fatah—will not bring peace but greater instability.

Still, Israel must do more than passively await regional change. As the Arab world confronts its options of Islamism, democratization or military dictatorship, Israel needs to endorse freedom. Israel's contribution to the new democratic spirit should be sending an unequivocal message to the Arab world that it has no intention of continuing the occupation for ideological motives, and that the only impediment to Palestinian independence is Palestinian intransigence, especially on the issue of refugees.

The least dangerous way for Israel to communicate that message is by declaring an open-ended building freeze in the settlements. That freeze would not include Jerusalem. No government—left, right or center—would stop building in East Jerusalem's existing Jewish neighborhoods. But a freeze should be unilateral—without expectation of reciprocity from the Palestinians. At the same time Israel should transfer control to the Palestinian Authority of more of the West Bank, and continue encouraging economic growth there.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's reluctance to impose another settlement freeze is understandable. His previous 10-month freeze—the first by any Israeli prime minister—was greeted with skepticism and brought only increased pressure from Washington to freeze building in Jerusalem. But regional conditions have since changed dramatically, and Israel needs to respond.

Mr. Netanyahu cannot impose another freeze while maintaining his present coalition. So he should seriously examine the new offer of opposition leader Tzipi Livni to form a unity government between the prime minister's Likud party and Kadima. A combination of policies—military restraint, an unconditional settlement freeze, realism regarding a Palestinian state—will express the resolve and sobriety of the Israeli public.

Israelis these days are preparing for Passover. The Passover seder is called a night of watching, in remembrance of the Israelites who were prepared at a moment's notice to flee Egypt and enter the unknown. This year Passover has particular resonance. For Israelis, living in a Middle East veering between freedom and even greater repression, it is a time of active watching.

WSJ: The Shaky House of Assad; Time to engage Syria's opposition, not its dictator

Every Arab country is unhappy in its own way, and it turns out Syria is no different. A wave of protests the past four days, starting in the city of Deraa on Friday and spreading, makes Iran's chief Arab ally a latecomer to the spring of Muslim discontent.

The unrest has taken Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and the U.S. foreign policy establishment by surprise. Syria was supposedly immune to Arab contagion. Earlier this month, Foreign Affairs magazine published "The Sturdy House That Assad Built," arguing that the Arab wave would not only "pass Syria by" but see Damascus "relatively strengthened" by the collapse of Egypt and other pro-American regimes. The West, urged German political scientist Michael Bröning, better think of new and better ways to "engage Assad."

The Obama Administration had already embraced this policy. The White House put an ambassador back in Damascus charged with pursuing a new detente. John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi have pushed the same line. The demonstrations and the Assad regime's bloody crackdown ought to give the champions of engagement pause. It turns out Syria's young and underemployed are no less frustrated with corruption and repression than are their peers from Tunis to Tehran.

Syria only looked "sturdy" until its people pushed on the doors of the house of Assad. Trouble started after hundreds of people in Deraa marched peacefully to protest the jailing of 15 schoolchildren who had written antiregime graffiti. Security forces opened fire, killing at least four. Protests continued through the funerals of the men killed. The offices of the ruling Baath Party in Deraa and vehicles were torched. Thousands yesterday marched in the nearby towns of Jasim and Inhkil. Demonstrations have also been reported in Damascus, Aleppo and other cities.

Like Libya's Moammar Gadhafi, Syria's regime isn't squeamish about using force against domestic opponents. Bashar Assad's kinder and gentler father, Hafez, ordered the massacre of 20,000 or so people during the 1982 uprising in the town of Hama. His son's allies in Iran certainly won't complain if Hama rules are applied in Deraa.

The U.S. national interest in this season of Arab uprisings is to have anti-American regimes fall while helping pro-American regimes to reform in a more liberal (in the 19th-century meaning of that word) direction. Rather than waste effort wooing Assad, the U.S. should support his domestic opponents at every opportunity. A weaker Syria might cause less trouble in Lebanon through its proxy, Hezbollah, and be less able to spread weapons and terror throughout the Mideast. Even bloody-minded authoritarians are less sturdy than they look to Westerners who mistake fear and order for consent.

WSJ: Are Israeli Settlers Human? A family of five slaughtered in their beds. Some Palestinians call it 'natural.'

A few years ago, British poet and Oxford don Tom Paulin offered a view on what should be done to certain Jewish settlers. "[They] should be shot dead," he told Al-Ahram Weekly. "I think they are Nazis, racists. I feel nothing but hatred for them." As for Israel itself, it was, he said, "an historical obscenity."

Last Friday, apparently one or more members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, the terrorist wing of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's "moderate" Fatah party, broke into the West Bank home of Udi and Ruth Fogel. The Jewish couple were stabbed to death along with their 11-year-old son Yoav, their 4-year-old son Elad and their 3-month-old daughter Hadas. Photographs taken after the murders and posted online show a literal bloodbath. Is Mr. Paulin satisfied now?

Unquestionably pleased are residents of the Palestinian town of Rafah in the Gaza Strip, who "hit the streets Saturday to celebrate the terror attack" and "handed out candy and sweets," according to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. The paper quoted one Rafah resident saying the massacre was "a natural response to the harm settlers inflict on the Palestinian residents in the West Bank." Just what kind of society thinks it's "natural" to slit the throats of children in their beds?

The answer: The same society that has named summer camps, soccer tournaments and a public square in Ramallah after Dalal Mughrabi, a Palestinian woman who in March 1978 killed an American photographer and hijacked a pair of Israeli buses, leading to the slaughter of 37 Israeli civilians, 13 children among them.

I have a feeling that years from now Palestinians will look back and wonder: How did we allow ourselves to become that? If and when that happens—though not until that happens—Palestinians and Israelis will at long last be able to live alongside each other in genuine peace and security.

But I also wonder whether a similar question will ever occur to the Palestinian movement's legion of fellow travelers in the West. To wit, how did they become so infatuated with a cause that they were willing to ignore its crimes—or, if not quite ignore them, treat them as no more than a function of the supposedly infinitely greater crime of Israeli occupation?

That's an important question because it forms part of the same pattern in which significant segments of Western opinion cheered Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro and Robert Mugabe and even Pol Pot. The cheering lasted just as long as was required to see the cause through to some iconic moment of triumph, and then it was on to the next struggle. It was left to others to pick up the pieces or take to the boats or die choking in their own blood.

Whether similar tragedies would unfold for Palestinians in the wake of their own "liberation" remains to be seen, though the portents—the experience of the postcolonial world generally and of the Gaza Strip specifically—aren't good.

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Four-year-old Elad Fogel, one of five members of the Fogel family who were stabbed to death in their home.

Even worse is that Palestinians have grown accustomed to the waiver the rest of the world has consistently granted them over the years no matter what they do. Palestinians ought to have expectations of themselves if they mean to build a viable state. But their chances of doing so are considerably diminished if the world expects nothing of them and forgives them everything.

It is precisely in this sense that the frenzied international condemnation of Israeli settlements and settlers does the most harm. Having been accorded the part of George Orwell's Emmanuel Goldstein—perpetual target of the proverbial two minutes of hate—they have drained whatever capacity there was to hold Palestinian actions to moral account, to say nothing of our ability to understand the nature of a conflict that is more than simply territorial. The demonization of the settlers has made the world not only coarse but blind.

I write these words as one who has long entertained doubts about the wisdom and viability of much of the settlement enterprise, though I've never considered it the core issue in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—a point well borne out by the example of Gaza following Israel's withdrawal.

Now I find myself cheering Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for announcing, in the wake of the Fogel family massacre, the construction of hundreds of additional homes in the settlements. Israel's consistent mistake since the peace process began nearly 18 years ago was to suppose that conspicuous displays of reasonableness and moderation would beget likewise on the other side. The reality has been closer to the opposite.

For 60 years, no nation has been held to such stringent moral account, or such ceaseless international hectoring, as Israel. And no people has been held to so slight an account as the Palestinians. Redressing that imbalance is the essential first step in finding a solution to the conflict. The grotesque murders of the Fogels and their little children demands nothing less.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com

Wall Street Journal Puzzles Over Obama And Israel

In an editorial today, the Wall Street Journal wonders why President Obama chose the world's most populous Muslim country as the platform for criticizing Israel for authorizing construction of apartments in its capital Jerusalem. The editorial ends with the fact that Indonesia prohibits Israelis from traveling to its country.

The prohibition seems to run counter to President Obama's declaration that Indonesia is the beacon of religious tolerance. Of course, Indonesia's record of intolerance of Christians fills the public record. Two to three hundred thousand Christians have been butchered by Muslims in Indonesia.

The Journal said:


So what did President Obama talk about upon arriving in Jakarta yesterday? Israeli construction projects.

Why Mr. Obama chose to pick this fight from the distance of Southeast Asia is anyone's guess. Israel's decision to proceed with the building of some 1,000 housing units in the Har Homa neighborhood of municipal Jerusalem--a "settlement" only in the most jaundiced sense of the term--was made in October. Israeli governments of both the right and left have encouraged similar building projects since Jerusalem was reunified in 1967. And construction of the new housing will not begin for months if not years.

None of that deterred Mr. Obama, who warned the Israeli government that "this kind of activity is never helpful when it comes to peace negotiations." The State Department also chimed in, saying it was "deeply disappointed," while Palestinian spokesman Saeb Erekat added that the new construction proves "that Israel chooses settlements, not peace." This is the same Mr. Erekat who recently wrote an admiring letter to Ahmed Sa'adat, the mastermind of the 2001 assassination of an Israeli cabinet member.

All Israel has done is insist that Jews have a right to live anywhere in their capital city, something that might be controversial in Ramallah but ought not to be in Washington. Mr. Obama's public endorsement of the Palestinian view of what constitutes a settlement only puts the negotiated peace he seeks further out of reach.

Meanwhile, the Indonesian government forbids Israeli citizens from visiting their country. If Mr. Obama wants to bridge the distance between Jakarta and Jerusalem, maybe he can start with that one.

WSJ: Can Israel Be Jewish and Democratic? Many nations have laws and practices that recognize their majority group's history, language or religion while also protecting the rights of minorities.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently asked Palestinian peace negotiators to acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state. Some critics have called this move cynical, because Palestinian leaders are unlikely to offer such an acknowledgment. But others oppose it for a more basic reason: They claim it is antidemocratic.

WSJ: Israel: A Normal Country

The following statement has been signed by Jose Maria Aznar, David Trimble, John R. Bolton, Alejandro Toledo, Marcello Pera, Andrew Roberts, Fiamma Nirenstein, George Weigel, Robert F. Agostinelli and Carlos Bustelo:

2010-07-08 by Founder Members

Israel is a Western democracy and a normal country. Nonetheless, Israel has faced abnormal circumstances since its inception. In fact, Israel is the only Western democracy whose existence has been questioned by force, and whose legitimacy is still being questioned independently of its actions.