120,000 dead Iraqi civilians would like to thank Andrew Sullivan for adamantly supporting George W Bush's illegal war on their nation.

Seriously, fuck that guy.

America values money over morals.

The Palestinian and Israeli people are responsible for their own suffering.

@4 the billions of dollars in weapons we send over there implicates us somewhat.

@5 Those rockets aren't all ours.

@6
The NRA doesn't own any of the guns we've been reading about.

@2 - People who can learn and admit their own past mistakes are not people to be slammed.

Sullivan has been wrong about a lot of things - not least some of his previous foreign policy positions - but he's at least learning and cluing in.

We will never - in our lifetimes (the lifetimes of anyone living today) anyway - get to a point where Palestinians or muslims in general are equally valued to Israelis and jewish people in general, despite lingering anti-semitic (really, anti-jewish) bigotry in this country. It wasn't always this way; in the teens and twenties, when the parents of people like Kasey Kasem arrived, the biases were much more matched (equally despised?)

We have three quarters of a century of pro-Israeli, pro-jewish cheerleading (propaganda? is the ADL listening? no doubt they are!) and holocaust guilting (unless of course, you want to be seen as a Nazi) which has pretty well tilted the balance in the public mind. Think how long it has taken for the Reefer Madness propaganda to fade away. - and with people like the Dominionist Xtians pushing a starkly millenialist pro-Zionist agenda...yeah, forget it.

What might be happening, after AIPAC and the Neo-Cons pulled us in, is that Americans, however little they think of "mooslims" have Israel fatigue too. Their ability to get us to carry water internationally and financially for the Zionist agenda will fade. There aren't enough votes in it any more. Giving Jolly Jerry Falwell a plane and enlisting the proto-talibangelicals on the side of Zionism back in the late 70s was a stroke of genius, but it's running out of time. Similarly, the Arab states are suffering from Palestine fatigue.

The last serious attempt to control the Israelis as a US client state was undertaken by Bush-I (yet another example of how much better the father than the son) when he pushed back on loan guarantees. AIPAC reamed him a new one and he was forced to cave. Nothing will change in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict until an American President can stand up to Likud with the backing of the Congress.

an Israeli cabinet minister was quoted on Now Promoting Republicans this morning as saying that they should "conquer" Gaza.

get ready for a lot more Palestinian suffering.

Make no mistake - the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is one of the greatest clusterfucks of the past 100 years. If God ever cared about those scraps of land he gave up on them long ago. That said, the author's failure to look at history that extends farther back than the current conflict undercuts his argument.

Yes Israel has had virtually no casualties, but that is because of the Iron Dome systems, developed precisely because of Hamas having launched tens of thousands of rockets at Israel. That is like saying that because police wear body armor due to the fact people shoot at them, that only bullets that penetrate the body armor count as attempts to murder.

Yes, Hamas is fighting an asymmetric war, but remember that Israel had THREE wars where every Arab nation that was their neighbor worked together to attack Israel with the goal of "driving them into the sea." In each one of those cases Israel won and took land (note, their settlements on the West Bank are an abomination to the concept of peace and their unwillingness to stop them from expanding is disgusting). The result of losing three offensive wars was for the Palestinians to switch to suicide bombers and rocket attacks.

Yes, Israel is firing missiles into the Gaza strip. Of course, Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and turned it over to complete Palestinian control. And Hamas took one of the greatest opportunities for peace and used it to ... turn Gaza into a base to launch rockets at Israel.

Look, both sides have plenty of blood on their hands (note that after signing the Oslo Peace agreement, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a radical right wing Israeli, and the threat of assassination for the next prime minister that bargains for peace is VERY real), but arguing that because Israel has found ways to defend itself against suicide bombers and rocket attacks it should ignore subsequent attacks is ludicrous.

Tell Hamas to stock sending rockets and commit to it.

Otherwise, Ansel, you really don't have enough knowledge to offer any opinion, even indirectly.

"At some point the childish attachment to fairy tales about magic people from a time long ago, in a land far away, needs to be addressed as urgent educational matter."

There's your real story, Andrew. You can't expect people to solve complicated problems if they can only approach the matter with "Jesus Saves!" or "Allahu Akbar!".

@4: I agree.

I hate the game of x suffering is worse than y suffering. It never helps ANY cause.

The Palestinians aren't helped by their poor leadership (Hamas' rockets do nothing but provide a pretext for Israel to hurt innocent Palestinians, and Fatah has been hopelessly corrupt and ineffective as the secular alternative), but we should be able to distinguish between bad leadership and the people who are being hurt by that leadership.

The same goes for Israel. They are being played by Netanyahu, who is putting the needs of West Bank squatters over the long-term security of his nation. He's reprehensible, but his poor leadership doesn't mean that Israel as a whole is to blame either.

But it is important to see that in terms of attacks on civilians, there is no moral equivalency. Israel is by far the bigger aggressor and the most guilty of violating norms of international behavior. Any analysis that isn't at least evenhanded (which really spots Israel more than they deserve) is basically Israeli propaganda and should be ignored. That's most of NPR's coverage, unfortunately.

#12 Is right.

The two state solution can work, and has worked many times throughout our history. But no progress can be made as long as magical religious sentiments about certain tribes and sections of dirt and rock poison the entire process.

You can not deal in good faith with people when you think they are basically evil, and you feel the same way towards them.

Make no mistake: this conflict is NOT about religion, it is about land. But religion poisons the process making resolution impossible.

That being said, Israel is not on the defensive. The occupying and invading army does not get to claim self-defense once the occupied start fighting back.

@8 & @10,
Very good observations. I believe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict intractable. No agreement will be forthcoming anytime soon. Certainly not under this administration. Right now, all any reasonable soul wants is a cease-fire. It is an imperative. It just may get worse if the 100,000 Gazans asked to leave are indeed forced to leave. I'm broken hearted over this.
A tragedy indeed.

Whether trouble is currently brewing over there or not, every time I see an article, editorial, comic, commentary or WHAT THE FUCK EVER posted about Israel/Palestine it always either boils down to "Fuck the Israelis" or "Fuck the Palestinians" (Or fuck the Jews or fuck the Arabs or Fuck the Muslims). It's like the people outside that godforsaken piece of land can't even elevate the dialog an iota higher than the fucktards running things on either side over there. Even a "fuck everybody" would be refreshing.

And what happens on pieces that try to propose some solution? Still nobody's fucking happy! OF COURSE all of the people running the various groups/parties/governments over there aren't going to be happy with any solution, that's what happens when you compromise-but when shit breaks down over there, people end up dying. Fucking idiots who don't even remotely have any kind of skin in the game can't even move beyond "fuck the zionists" or "fuck the palestinians" so what fucking hope is there for the goddamned shitheads running the show and getting people killed over there?

And when will we as a country address the lightness with which we treat the suffering caused by racist blacks and Muslims with the way we treat it when it's the other way around? The Stranger did more articles and more condemnation on the deaths of 2 black males by whites in Florida then all the black on white and Asian mob attacks which have been rampant in the region for almost a decade.
When the Jewish Center shooter trial ended in a hung jury on 13 out of the 14 counts there was no outrage from this paper. When the trial of Michael Dunn resulted in a hung jury on 1 out of 6 counts (he was convicted of the other 5) the Stranger was outraged.
The Jewish Center shooting happened in this city while the other murder happened all the way across the country. So why outrage over convicted on 5 out of 6 counts when the victim is black and in Florida but no outrage over convicted of only 1 count and mistrial on all others when the victim if Jewish (and the perp Muslim) and it happens in Seattle?
I remember no outrage when the black mob who stomped to death the Tuba Man did not even serve one day in jail. Don't tell me if the races were reverse the outrage level would not have been sky high.

@16: I wish I could report you for being boring. Seriously, if you are going to troll, at least keep it fresh. If you are just fantasizing, keep it to yourself.

Charles Mudede once did a story on an act of Jewish on black violence in Israel. 2 days before my Jewish friend was beaten half to death by a black mob in a random attack 2 blocks from the Stanger's office. Not a word about it in the Stranger. Yes, we obviously need to do something about the discrepancy with how we treat suffering. It took blacks and their white allies 5 minutes to call Trayvon Martin's death a racially motivated injustice caused by his race and what he was wearing on his head. It's been over 20 years and they still try to justify blacks doing just that to Jews in Crown Heights. Justice was never done in Crown Heights. RIP Yankel Rosenbaum and Antony Grazzoni. When will the media and leftists treat this crime the same as if the races were reverse? Wanna see a photo of a child who was attacked by a racist mob? Google "Issac Bitton Crown Heights". The mob was never brought to justice nor were the police who stood 10 feet away and allowed this child to be attacked fired. You show me where leftists were outraged over this. You show me where this was called police brutality. But if the same thing happens in Israel American leftists will condemn it in 5 minutes.

The Stranger needs to look at their huge racial/religious bias. It's not like they treat suffering equally regardless of the racial and religious makeup of people involved.

@20/21 or apparently "Fuck whatever ethnic group." Fresh new hate to enjoy! TASTY!

@18,

I'll say it. Fuck everybody.

Fuck the Palestinians for pissing away an unoccupied Gaza (which was something that used up considerable political capital on the part of Sharon in Israel; Sharon doing it was a serious Nixon in China moment) by putting Hamas in power. Fuck Hamas for indiscriminately lobbing rockets into Israel and then using the Gaza civilian population as human shields.

Fuck the Israelis for voting right-wing nutjobs into power. Fuck the Israelis for continuing to settle in the West Bank.

Fuck us for giving money and weapons to the Israelis with no real conditions. Fuck us for also giving money to Hamas.

Fuck the other Arab states for using the Palestinian crisis to flog Israel on the international stage. And fuck the Arab states for not actually giving a flying fuck about the Palestinians.

@21: The funny thing about you is that you actually have a point regarding The Stranger and its biased coverages of crime. An example would be recently when Ansel "reported" on an Uber driver not assaulting anyone, but the paper was silent on the Yellow Cab driver who actually sexually assaulted people. There are definitely stories The Stranger does not want to share because they go against the bklack and white Oppressor/Opressed narrative they enjoy.

People would take you more seriously if you mentioned something other than wild black mobs prowling the streets though, because we can all see your racist motivations.

Furthermore, if this was as big an issue as you claim, you would not be using the same three examples for the last three-four years or so.

@14 - say what you will, but Israel is in fact a democracy - not just in name. Bibi, Avigdor Lieberman and Shas have real constituencies...not all Israelis are helpless victims of their leadership. Right now Netanyahu's poll numbers are strong, across the spectrum.

@18 - you're right, I don't have any skin in the game...at least, nothing beyond the billions blown in Iraq. That's all the more reason to stop intervening in a conflict where we don't even have oil or some other natural resource to exploit from some friendly regime we prop up. And for all the propping up we do, it's not exactly like the Israelis are a friendly regime...they like to give our presidents the finger (whichever party, whenever they have the temerity to stand up to Israel), and they are an ally who spies on us, manipulates our internal politics and fires on us periodically...so yeah, let them alone and cut off the subsidy.

#14 and #25 are right on the money.

@19, 21, 22: You can take your goyish ass out of here and stop trying to pit the House of Israel against black people, you Agagite.

Hamas is a totalitarian entity that condones honor killings of women, hangs gays, and burns churches. It is the belligerent that started this horrible war by firing rockets into Israel.

Hamas has committed double war crimes by firing rockets into civilian areas of Israel and firing those rockets from civilian areas within the four large cities in Gaza rather than firing them from the rural areas outside of those cities.

Both sides suffer. If Hamas were to cease its rocket attacks, then the war would end. Hamas has refused the cease fire brokered by Egypt, and agreed to by Israel, and continues its rocket fire.

Regards

Andrew Fucking Sullivan on morality, ladies and gentlemen. He'll be here all week. Tip your waitress.

I was going to chime in, but @25 nailed it. Not only is everyone fucked, everyone will continue being fucked pretty much forever. Happy goddam Wednesday.

@8: Don't even try. @DOUG. is a zealot. People like DOUG are even more foolish than those who supported the war. They value absolute correctness over learning. Absolute correctness helps you in the past while learning helps you today. But in their mind, if you were right once, you will always be right and if you were wrong once, you will always be wrong.

@25: And most of all fuck the innocent children who were just killed. If we have learned anything from this conflict it is that the weak deserve to die. And the powerful on all sides deserve to excuse their killings for the greater good. And if you don't think the killing of children is a good thing, then perhaps you don't like doing things for the greater good. What kind of world would we create if we couldn't justify our actions thusly?

"@2 - People who can learn and admit their own past mistakes are not people to be slammed...Sullivan has been wrong about a lot of things - not least some of his previous foreign policy positions - but he's at least learning and cluing in."

Maybe such people are not to be slammed, but when someone is so consistently wrong about so very many things, they are people NOT TO BE LISTENED TO ever again.

As for Sullivan specifically, people seem to forget - all the time they forget - how he more or less advocated nuking Iraq after the anthrax scare. From October 17, 2001:

At this point, it seems to me that a refusal to extend the war to Iraq is not even an option. We have to extend it to Iraq, which is by far the most likely source of this anthrax; Saddam is clearly willing to use such weapons in the future; and no war against terrorism of this kind can be won without dealing decisively with the Iraqi threat. We no longer have any choice in the matter. Slowly, incrementally, a Rubicon has been crossed. The terrorists have launched a biological weapon against the United States. They have therefore made biological warfare thinkable and thus repeatable. We once had a doctrine that such a Rubicon would be answered with a nuclear response. We backed down on that threat in the Gulf War but Saddam didn’t dare use biological weapons then. Someone has dared to use them now. Our response must be as grave as this new threat.

Not that Sullivan will never say anything smart again - not that he's necessarily wrong about this, I'm not taking a position on it - but that he should be ignored as a public figure forever, because he has had more than enough chances. He advocated for nuking the Iraqi people based on no evidence: I'm supposed to listen to him seriously on ANYTHING ever again? Really? Why?

And if I'm supposed to take him seriously after his long and miserable history of errors, what is your standard for when I can stop? How wrong would he have to be for it to be ok for me to stop listening to him?

Objectively, it looks like a colonial war we in the West keep trying to pretend is something else.

@37
Yeah, some people always like to come up with the old imperial excuse for killing gays, enslaving their women, producing nothing of any value (drilling holes in the ground all done with western technology) and so forth. They have done some great things but not for about 800 years.

@36 - you can ignore him any time you like, but if you want to discount him, do it on the merits of what he has to say, on a case by case basis. The huge mistake is in making it a matter of authority rather than reason and supporting evidence. A stopped clock is correct 2x a day and it's foolish to claim it's wrong on those two moments just because it's stopped.

For all you Hamas-haters: Irgun, you reap what you sow. "This War" isn't some new, discrete and isolated event. it's just another battle/skirmish in a war that's been going on since 1967. Yes, Hamas is full of barbaric reactionaries...that's what you wind up with when you keep gradually increasing the pressure on a population and slowly grinding them up; they get increasingly radicalized. WTF did you think was going to happen? They would lay down and die nicely? They will die, but they'll make sure it costs you horribly.

@AFinch.

You demonstrate NO IDEA of Israeli history.

-The Irgun operated in the late 1940s and was long gone as terrorists (which was limited anyway) in the 1940s.
-The war between Jews and Arabs has been going since the 1930s.
-You could turn it around and look at the way Arabs treated Jews going back a thousand years and say "Well, what do you expect, Arabs? You acted like assholes most of the time. So stop complaining. You reap what you sow."

None of that should defend the Occupation but since you acknowledge that there is a war going on, and has for 80 years, how do you expect the Jews to treat the Palis in the West Bank? They are the enemy. Anyway, in the big picture, the Palis are lucky to have the Jews as enemies.

@40 - you can re-spin it if you like, but Irgun was a terrorist organization, not the "state" - the "state", prior to 1948, was the British Mandate, and prior to that, the Ottoman Empire.

Haganah, the less radical paramilitary organization (and perhaps terrorist group - more like the PLO than Hamas) from which Irgun emerged - did evolve into the IDF after 1948. Haganah was not sufficiently violent or right-wing enough for the Stern Gang and the like, so they split off.

A great starting point, for anyone interested, is this article about the birth of the Jewish Paramilitaries in Palestine.

You may view these Polish Gangs as "founders" and "freedom fighters" - as many Palestinians view Hamas - but to the British government they were just criminal gangs who engaged in terrorism. Very little has changed, of course: the most violent and ruthless right wing movements in Israel continue to be freshly imported Ashkenazim organized under that Russian thug, Avigdor Lieberman.

@40 - The Jewish Paramilitaries were operating from 1909 until 1948; Irgun from 1930-1948. You're a little short on facts.

Sure...the Palestinians are sooooo lucky to have been colonized by a bunch of Eastern Europeans who systematically took over and are slowly but surely setting up a Theocracy.

The Palestinians have been their own worst enemy at several points; Arafat should have taken the deal.

Israel has a problem though: it exists purely out of European Guilt - it requires the image of righteous triumph over millennia of oppression and near-extermination. The longer this drags on, the less the Israelis are seen as the oppressed and the more they start looking like Afrikaners (at best).

In general, the people formerly colonized by the British (with the exception of Native Americans) have come off far better than the arabs in Palestine.

Israel is a failed state. It was established to give the Jewish people a secure homeland.

It's not working. It's probably never going to work.

That's failure.