Via Kevin Drum, I see this interesting piece in WaPo:
Four former chiefs of Israel’s powerful domestic security service said in an interview published Friday that the government’s actions and policies during the three-year-old Palestinian uprising have gravely damaged the country and its people.
The four, who variously headed the Shin Bet security agency from 1980 to 2000 under governments that spanned the political spectrum, said that Israel must end its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, that the government should recognize that no peace agreement can be reached without the involvement of the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, and that it must stop what one called the immoral treatment of Palestinians.
“We must once and for all admit that there is another side, that it has feelings and that it is suffering, and that we are behaving disgracefully,” said Avraham Shalom, who headed the security service from 1980 until 1986. “Yes, there is no other word for it: disgracefully. . . . We have turned into a people of petty fighters using the wrong tools.”
Like Kevin, I see this as a somewhat hopeful sign. Clearly, the policies of the Sharon government aren’t working. Indeed, as I’ve often noted, he’s taking the absolute worst tack imaginable: launching brutal attacks without much regard to the fate of non-combatants and yet leaving the job undone. It’s just not a policy a civilized nation can sustain.
That said, short of an outrageous policy of ethnic cleansing–pushing the Palestinians out altogether and leaving the area as an unsettled military buffer zone–I don’t have any solutions. Even if there were a more reasonable Israeli leader, Arafat has proven time and again that he’s not a reliable negotiating partner. The deal that was on the table in the late 1990s is about as good as Israel can offer while maintaing its own security, and it was rejected. So I don’t hold out much hope for a negotiated settlement, either.
This interactive history is interesting, if cursory.
