Well, Roger Simon started it, and while he actually knows something about movies, lack of subject-matter knowledge has never stopped bloggers in the past. So here are my 20-or-so favorites.

1. Providence (Alain Resnais). John Gielgud, Dirk Bogarde, and Ellyn Burstein in the best move ever made about writing and artistic imagination. A fevered night in the imagination of a novelist, and a bright morning in his life.

2. Samurai Trilogy (Kurosawa Inagaki). The story of Miyamoto Musashi – essentially the Japanese version of ‘Gone With The Wind’, with Mifune in the title role of the samurai, philosopher, and artist.

3. Decalog (Kieslowski). Ten loosely liked stories set in a Polish apartment block and based on the Commandments. Episodes 1 and 2 are so powerful that I can’t watch them too often, and yet have to.

4. Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (Girard). An ephemeral set of vignettes that still serves as the most definitive film biography of anyone that I’ve seen. I happen to be a huge Gould fan, but friends who aren’t love this as well.

5. Choose Me (Rudolph). The most romantic move I’ve ever seen, and one that captures L.A. in the early 80’s (Ed Ruscha is in it!) better than any history book you’re likely to read.

6. Singin’ In The Rain (Donen/Kelley). I mean, ‘Singin In The Rain.’ What else do you need to know? Gene Kelley, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds, Cyd Charisse, Comden and Green, “Moses Supposes”,”Dignity”, and “Singin In The Rain.

7. Henry V (Branagh). “No King of England if not King of France,” and St. Crispin’s Day. Sadly, Branagh’s best to date, but I still have hopes for him.

8. Oklahoma (Zinneman). The American experience in the American musical.

9. Godfather II (Coppola). The look on Pacino’s face at the end of the film is the payoff; the film itself is a riveting counterpoint to ‘Oklahoma!”.

10. Yankee Doodle Dandy (Curtiz). A joy to watch, and something that let Cagney express the warm heart under the hard edge.

11. Young Frankenstein (Brooks). Hard to figure out which Brooks to pick, but this is the one we watch the most often.

12. Chinatown (Polanski). Perfect surfaces, sullen, soiled woman, and John Huston as the appetite that built a city. I see echoes of this film everywhere I go; in Catalina last month, I sat in one of the yacht clubs and looked around…

13. Winchester ’73 (Mann). James Stewart moves away from ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ and shows what the hardness in his eyes means. A valued gun is stolen, and Stewart goes to get it back.

14. Blade Runner (Scott). The future. Where William Gibson got all his ideas.

15. Bringing Up Baby (Hawks). Grant, Hepburn, and the definition of effortless attraction based on brains and sharp wit.

16. White Hunter, Black Heart (Eastwood). Clint Eastwood plays John Houston in Africa. Eastwood, beaten in body and spirit, being driven away and waving with malice to the local gentry.

17. Don’t Look Now (Roeg). Roeg also made ‘Performance’ which almost made the list, but this is the scariest, sexiest movie I think I’ve ever seen. It’s the only movie I know that has caused me to lose sleep; I can’t reccomend it enough.

18. King of New York (Ferera). Over-the-top 90’s gangster movie, worth watching for Christopher Walken’s definitive portrait of the master criminal out for one last score and for Lawrence Fishburne’s mindblowing hip-hop gangster, Jimmy Jump.

19. M.A.S.H. (Altman). Dude, the 70’s were largely defined by the attitudes in this movie. And not only is it a historical artifact, but it’s damn funny and one of the last Altman films in which he actually cares about his characters.

20. Shakespeare In Love (Madden). A much better than OK movie, but it has one magical quality – it makes you imagine what it must have been like to see a Shakespeare play for the first time.

21. The Long Goodbye (Altman). Phillip Marlowe trying to live in 1970’s Los Angeles. Honor? What does that mean?

Hey, dude – a quick primer. Ugly domestic politics != (geek for Does Not Equal) Gulags. The fact that you think they do – and that for much of the radical left they do – is the core of the moral blindness that’s going to keep you out of power for the next decade, and hand the keys to the country to the Right.

Unless people like Michael Totten and Marc Brazeau can manage to take control of the Democratic Party.

JK: What Duranty covered up wasn’t just Gulags – it was Stalin’s genocide of 4-10 million people. For more on real Gulgas today, meanwhile, see P.’s North Korea post. Oddly, Atrios doesn’t seem too worked up about that. Or about Duranty, for that matter. I’m sure his link to a Communist magazine as his preferred source today is just a coincidence….

I’m bidding three new projects (rates are almost back to where they were in 1997!!), and neck-deep in a charity project (fun, because it’s going to work out and I’ve managed to rope some Really Big People in to help bail the boat), which means that blogging has been kinda ad hoc.

But there are 3 things in the blog queue that refer to other people’s blogs, and I don’t want these excellent posts from Porphy, Blogonaut, and Demosophia to go stale(er). So here we go…First, Porphy a while ago did a thoughtful series of posts decrying the Academy and suggesting that it’s the seat of Bad Philosophy, and that it’s not looking good for our team over there. I think his arguments are good and interesting, but – partly because I’m an innate optimist (hey, I’m going to get married for the third time!) – I don’t have his level of anxiety about this.

It’s a serious issue, but let me hold this out as a counterpoint:

A new nationwide poll, released yesterday by Harvard University’s Institute Of Politics, finds she is far from alone: Of the 1,200 student respondents, 31 percent identified themselves as Republicans, compared with 27 percent who said they are Democrats. The largest number, 38 percent, called themselves Independent, or unaffiliated.

The Academy doesn’t live in a dewar; it is refreshed every year with new students who come in, go through it, are changed and change it in turn. Eventually, they will run departments…and it won’t be in geologic or even historic time. Porphy and I’ll be around to see it.

Plus I owe him a response to his funny “You Know You’re a Liberal” post.

Next, Marc Brazeau, in Portland Oregon (Michael Totten, have you had dinner with him yet?) has a damn interesting set of policy prescriptions for the Democratic Party in the next few years. It’s a long list, I agree with some but not all, but it sets out an interesting place to start talking about liberal strategy. My alltime favorite:

Democrats should be striking a bargain between business and the organized constituencies that act as countervailing forces. The bargain is this: Less regulation – More enforcement. Simpler, less nitpicky laws in exchange for bigger budgets for enforcement and real penalties for non-compliance – ball busting fines and in appropriate cases: jail time.

Ties in nicely with this, doesn’t it? I’ll dig in, but I’m also shamed; I need to stop doing cute op-eds and start being prescriptive.

Scott Talkington has a cool blog called Demosophia; what got my attention there was a damn good post on “Totalitarianism 3.0” Here’s a sample:

But it seems that, ironically, the most virulent and world-threatening forms of the malady have coincided with the rise and spread of liberal democracy. I would almost suspect that the mere presence of a system seeking to institutionalize the optimization of liberty gives rise to an opposing ideal that seeks to control every thought and act through terror. And the first manifestation of this ancient rivalry may have been in the epic Peloponnesian Wars between Athens and Sparta.

Go hang out and learn something from these folks; you may not agree, but I can guarantee you won’t be bored.

Sometime soon I’ll dig in and complement and criticize in detail – I promise!!

(corrected deeply embarassing misspelling of Scott’s blog; thanks to Mitch for the correction)

I briefly commented earlier on the Rumsfeld memo, and the related Parameters article attempting to evaluate the intellectual and philosophical grounding of the leadership of our military.

As was predictable, certain folks have seized on this as one that “emphasizes how the grim picture painted in it is at odds with Rumsfeld’s public ‘Shiny Happy Iraqi People’ public pronouncements.” Daschle said:

“Secretary Rumsfeld’s comments are an illustration of the concern that they have about the failure of their policies in Iraq so far. There can be no other description of those words than that.”

Personally, I was damn happy to see it.I am and have been critical of the Administration for doing the right thing – taking the Islamist threat seriously and responding – yet lacking (or at least not sharing) a clear vision of what we were doing, and downplaying the seriousness and difficulty of the conflict we have been handed.

This memo – and article – are glimmers of hope to me. First, they suggest that the Administration, which I have been convinced has pursued a somewhat closed-minded approach in the leadup to the war is willing to look at alternate paths. Next, and most critically important, it means they are asking the right core question – how do we know when we’re winning? How do we define ‘victory’ in this murky conflict?

I said, in talking about the economic success of the U.S.:

The success of the American economic model is built largely on failure.

It is built on our willingness as a people to try things and to risk failing; built on the fact that we accept failure as part of the price of ultimate success; and ultimately on our willingness to accept displacement and change as a natural part of our social and economic lives.

Our military success is founded on the incredible logistical and technological advantages that our economy has given us – and also on our willingness to apply the same principles to our warfighting; to learn, to adapt, to change.

If Rumsfeld hasn’t written this memo, he should have been fired, and I hope to God that the fact that so many Democrats are seizing on it is so much political spin, rather than sheer naive stupidity – which is what it is if they aren’t spinning.

Just in time for Rumsfeld’s famous memo to hit the press, Parameters, the magazine of the US Army War college, publishes this article – “Strategic Leader Readiness and Competencies for Asymmetric Warfare.” (pdf, requires free Acrobat reader)

I’m still absorbing it, but let me toss out a few quotes to get the discussion started:

Both current and past senior civilian defense officials reportedly have grown increasingly frustrated with the conventional mindset of many strategic level military officers. In their view, too many senior leaders are too cautious, lacking the “fresh thinking, creativity, and ingenuity” to engage in the “out-of-the-box” thinking required to fully understand the new asymmetric threats and challenges posed by the global war on terrorism.

and

This article seeks to identify the adaptive linkages that exist between strategic leader competencies and the mental readiness for asymmetric and more conventional warfare. Fortunately, the writings of Sun Tzu and Clausewitz seem to offer a framework to help guide the needed adaptation in strategic leader thinking with regard to asymmetric approaches to warfare. An identification of these characteristics in the writings of both Sun Tzu and Clausewitz offers the opportunity to adapt their concepts to the present and anticipated challenges of asymmetric approaches to warfare. However, it is also important to recognize that while “asymmetry is important to strategy . . . not everything is asymmetry.”

Take a look, as I think I’ll be commenting on this and the Rumsfeld memo in more depth in the next little while.

To get a glimpse of how I feel about this, go read this old post on risk.

It’s immensely annoying to have to write approving things about Instapundit (particularly right after you get Instalanched) – it makes me worry that people will think I’m blog-rolling and whoring for traffic (comments and emails yes, traffic no – it costs money!!). But he blogged something near and dear to my heart today over at MSNBC, and I think that each of you ought to go over and read it now.
Back already?

I know what you’re thinking. You’re a bit titillated that Glenn blogged about oral sex, and otherwise, you’re just going “Yeah, whatever.” The commenters over at TalkLeft sure were.

Well don’t.

Because this is absolutely-damn-important.

I don’t care if you’re a liberal or a conservative. This issue – the increasingly dense spider web of law and administrative regulation that we find ourselves bound in – screws up your hopes.

For conservatives, it’s a gimme. The State enmeshes it’s eeevil tentacles deeper and deeper into your flesh…iaaaa, C’thulu, C’thulu…etc. By definition, conservatives (as opposed to Republicans, who are fine with regulation if it promotes Christian faith or behavior, regulates unseemly sexual behavior, or subsidizes favored businesses) are opposed to this.

But liberals need to be opposed as well. They need to be opposed for a variety of critically important reasons.

First, and foremost, because it makes each of us subject to the arbitrary whim of law enforcement. Remember the notion that law enforcement should be fair? Tough to do when everyone’s a lawbreaker and the officer and agents of the court can pick who they want to stop, and book, and prosecute. I said:

The average speed on the 110 freeway (except during rush hour congestion) is over 80 miles per hour. The speed limit is 55; this means that the enforcing officer can select from a huge population of violators at will. Is he a racist? Then black drivers may get cited. Is she mad at her red-haired ex-husband? Red-haired drivers will get red lights in the mirror.

This kind of law gives incredible unlegislated discretion and power to the enforcers, and makes the average citizen into the average lawbreaker.

But our political system runs on it…

But that’s not all.

Somehow many liberals have become lost in a fog in which legislation is a meaningful substitute for action. I don’t want legislation, I want change, and somehow I’m being handed a bill of goods by my legislators who somehow believe I can’t tell the difference.

I’ve always believed that one of the key problems in our system of government is that we all confuse passing laws with making changes.

As anyone who’s ever managed people knows, there’s a world of difference between sending memos (or policy and procedures documents) and changing employee behavior.

Look, if you’re a liberal – and I hope that at least a couple of the people rewarding this are – when you petition the State to act on an issue, what do you want? Do you want better schools, or a thicker book of regulations and an entire bureaucratic armada to (selectively) enforce them? And in so doing, neither accomplish the goal (which is supposedly why you want something done) and arm the opposition with another host of arguments for why liberalism is ineffective, intrusive, and immoral?

And for both liberals and conservatives, because it attacks legitimacy, that critical web that ties us together into a polity. Reynolds talks about how “ the law loses prestige.” I don’t think that’s a strong enough statement (although he’s a law professor, so maybe it means more to him than to me). Legitimacy is critical, and sadly in short supply these days.

To sum up:

So … pass a law … get a photo op … accomplish nothing. This is worse than just ineffective. It is worse because the presence of this vast body of unenforced law both breeds contempt for the law (decline in legitimacy) and creates a kind of bureaucratic leverage over each of us, as we are caught in a web of selectively enforced laws.

My quote on the recall:

Electing him will be a slap to the face of the political class, which it badly needs.

From the SJ Mercury News (probably the best paper in California, by the way) today:

Some prominent Democrats read the election as a rebellion against partisan gridlock in general, not a repudiation of their party.

The recall election was a “hell of a wake-up call” for all political leaders across the state, Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson said Tuesday.

“Californians said: `Business as usual is not cutting it. We are sick and tired of partisan bickering. Get the job done,’ ” said Wesson, D-Los Angeles.

And this:

In a memo distributed to Democratic Assembly members three days after the election, their chief campaign strategist, Darry Sragow, had this advice:

“While voters continue to support Democratic ideals, they need reassurance that Democrats also grasp and are prepared to deal with the public’s concerns about jobs and pocketbook issues — the state’s and their own.”

The Democratic caucus, he added, should “put aside whatever differences it may have with the governor-elect and enter into good-faith negotiations regarding the budget.”

Not that I’m smug about it or anything…

Most of you (who have televisions) know more than I do about the Kobe Bryant case.

What I pay attention to and know is brief; there was a sexual encounter, it devolved into the “he said/she said” of consensual sex versus rape, with what little physical evidence has made it to the media that gets my attention decidedly ambivalent.

I have all kinds of responses to this: The come from three places – from my own life as a pretty sexually active young man in high school, college, and afterwards; from a painful pair of experiences I had back then; and most important of all, as a man with three sons who do talk to me and who I am responsible for equipping to navigate the treacherous world.

And finally, there is an issue that comes up under this that transcends the issue of sexual politics and comes out in areas that I feel are broadly important – which is really why I want to write about this.I was fortunate (or not, depending on your point of view) to come of age in the late 60’s and early 70’s first in West Los Angeles, then in Santa Cruz. There wasn’t a lot of parental supervision, and we pretty much got to do what we wanted. Much of it, unsurprisingly, revolved around sex. We had thrown the old rules of courtship out the window, and hadn’t yet made up any new ones.

So there was a lot of room for bad behavior, and really no standards against which to judge it.

My own story is relatively minor: A woman who I knew slightly came to me in an emotionally fragile state, and while my memory today is clear that it was she who initiated things, matters came to a head when she, nude, slammed me in the jaw and ran out my door, clutching her clothes. I sat up that night, realizing that while what I’d done wasn’t vile – barely – it was certainly wrong; and that while she’d been the aggressor, a gentle man – a responsible man – would have pushed her away and made a date for a future time when she might be more self-posessed. To this day, I’m grateful to her for hitting me (she’s one of the very few people who have raised a hand to me about whom I would say that).

In the other issue, I was a witness, then a participant in cleaning up the mess: Two students got onto an elevator and Something Happened. He denied it, she asserted it, and the disciplinary codes at the time gave a fair amount of room to decide what to do. He was my friend, and I didn’t believe him capable of what he was charged with; I wound up as his defender, and got him off with a relatively minor sanction. Of course, it later turned out that the charges were true.

So it’s a complex world, with rules we often reject where we understand them. And past performance is obviously no guarantee of good behavior.

Do I think that men have sexually abused women through most of history and gotten away with it? Absolutely yes. Do I think that the rules today are totally stacked in favor of the accuser, and that innocent men suffer unjustly? Equally absolutely yes. I don’t yet know how we navigate this. I think we have a complex of half abandoned structures that once regulated our behavior, and half-emerged new ones that someday will. And now we’re in the valley, just pushing forward as best we can. There are so many issues where the balance between men and women had not yet hit an equilibrium; I could do an entire blog on it, but this isn’t that blog.

When Biggest Guy was of an age that he was likely to be sexually active – when he had a car and was out on his own away from adult supervision, he and I had a series of long talks about the risks involved. One that I had been particularly concerned about was AIDS; his and his brothers’ godfather died of it when he was about nine, and was old enough to have some idea of what was going on. I wanted to make sure that the sex=death fear wasn’t there for him, but that the had a healthy respect for the risks. To me the greatest risks weren’t AIDS (actually a low risk in his population subgroup), but the old-fashioned ones of pregnancy and emotional damage. I recently had much the same talk with Middle Guy.

But when Biggest Guy went away to Virginia and then started school, we had the most serious talk. I explained it to him simply; the rules were stacked against him. It wasn’t right or fair but that’s what it was and that, simply, if he wasn’t a true gentleman, the consequences for him might be much worse than a sore jaw. He got it and so far, from what I hear and see, he’s on his way to walking through this first minefield.

I’m still holding my breath.

And on the bigger issue; TG and I were playing with a toddler girl during Dave & Deborah’s wedding; the little girl was at that appallingly cute age when walking it itself a form of self-expression, and when round pink cheeks (usually flecked with the remains of a snack) frame a smile of total exuberance. The girl’s mom and I had chatted and she knew I had older boys. “Do you wish you’d had a girl?” And before I could consciously think, I replied “Well, she’d shoot damn well, that’s for sure.”

It’s a difficult thing to say, but I think that women have a duty to resist. I’m very aware of the risks. But it’s not to distinguish themselves as victims of violence, rather than someone who “says yes and then changed her mind,” but for the same simple reason that I think we all have a duty to resist. Because it raises the price of being a predator. In matters of sex, men who transgressed were once at risk from the woman’s kin or from the community if in fact their transgression was public enough and the victim someone who mattered. In matters of violence, it was the norm to resist, and the negative consequences of those actions is in part what kept bad behavior in check.

Today we are taught to passively get through it, and then go seek counseling.

Men who are basically guilty of not being gentlemen are labelled as predators, and the predators – sexual and otherwise – continue to flourish, because we’ve built an ecology that suits them just fine.

I think we can change that, one sock to the jaw at a time.

I gather that Biggest Guy has taken up studying Latin back in Virginia. He IM’ed me this link, to quislibet’s blog over on Live Journal, where he offers this translation:

magnae clunes mihi placent, nec possum de hac re mentiri.
(Large buttocks are pleasing to me, nor am I able to lie concerning this matter.)
quis enim, consortes mei, non fateatur,
(For who, colleagues, would not admit,)
cum puella incedit minore medio corpore
(Whenever a girl comes by with a rather small middle part of the body)
sub quo manifestus globus, inflammare animos
(Beneath which is an obvious spherical mass, that it inflames the spirits)
virtute praestare ut velitis, notantes bracas eius
(So that you want to be conspicuous for manly virtue, noticing her breeches)
clunibus profunde fartas(*1) esse
(Have been deeply stuffed with buttock?)
a! captus sum, nec desinere intueri possum.
(Alas! I am captured, nor am I able to desist from gazing.)

Some people prefer the original Sir Mix-A-Lot version…

I commented a while ago (note that the map isn’t fixed, sadly demonstrating the powerlessness ofthe Blogoverse) about my negative reaction to Israel’s newly announced plan to build 600 new homes in the occupied West Bank.

My reaction was in large part triggered by the announcement, but then I read this editorial in the NY Times (looked but couldn’t find the original Haaretz article online Mich at Tonecluster just forwarded the url of the article in a comment below), and my feelings were even stronger:

The newspaper said it had given a team of reporters three months to interview officials, pore over ministry budgets and make calculations. The exercise was filled with frustration, but the conclusion drawn is that since 1967, Israel has spent roughly $10 billion on the settlements. Currently, the annual amount spent on settlements’ civilian needs is more than $500 million.

One of the reasons the Haaretz study was so difficult to carry out is that the Israeli government’s budgets have purposefully hidden spending on settlements within other costs, bundling them with subsidies to border communities and those in the Negev Desert, areas where people need to be induced to live either because of risk or limited economic opportunities. This cover-up is part of an unhappy pattern. Look at any government map of Israel, and you will find no border demarcating the occupied territories. Although Israel has never officially annexed the West Bank and Gaza Strip, it has treated them, in many ways, as if it had.

This means that those seeking to establish Jewish towns and villages in the captured lands have benefited from generous government subsidies: personal income tax breaks, grants and loans for house purchases, bonuses for teachers. The Jewish settlers, who now number 230,000, have been granted special bypass highways, water supplies and health clinics. Even the cheery red-roofed bedroom settlements a few miles from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem are treated as if they were distant depressed towns. Teachers who settle in them, for example, get four years’ seniority, an 80 percent housing subsidy and 100 percent reimbursement for travel, and more. The result, according to Haaretz, is that the average settler family benefits from about $10,000 more per year of government spending than a family living within Israel proper.

Here’s the deal.

Pretty much every one of us – regardless of whether we live in the Americas, Europe, Asia, or Africa, lives on land taken from other people by conquest. That’s pretty much the basic story behind our history as humans.

The question becomes: When do we stop the clock?

In 1967, Israel took by force of arms the territories known as the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. They held them, originally, as a defense against conventional military invasion, as had been attempted in 1948, was imminent in 1967, and was tried again in 1973. With those territories, came a population of Arabs – many displaced in the conflicts of 1948, and loosely Jordanian, Syrian, and Egyptian at first – but now and forever Palestinian.

The question is simple: Did Israel hold those territories as conquest, with the intent of expanding into them? Or were they a military buffer and political bargaining chip? As a military buffer, events, history, and military technology appear to have passed their usefulness by. As a political bargaining chip, Israel seems to find itself in the predicament of the kidnappers who took Bette Midler in ‘Ruthless People’…no one wants them back.

So what we’re left with is conquest.

Morally, many (including me) find that repugnant. And the official claim is that Israel doesn’t intent to take over (“colonize,” for lack of a better term) the Occupied Territories; Israeli efforts to negotiate some kind of ‘land for peace’ deal would support that.

But…

…by building an increasingly dense network of civilian communities in the West Bank and Gaza, what happens on the ground looks like a creeping colonization.

So as much as I’m happy to bust the Arab world for talking peace and diplomacy in English and bombs and bullets in Arabic, I have to wonder how it is that we’re talking diplomacy and ceding control of the Occupied Territories in English, and budgeting for new construction in Hebrew.

Let me note one thing: I haven’t changed my opinion that offering statehood to the Palestinian people, as things stand today, would be a fool’s errand. Either there is no government capable of containing the violence of the various sects, or the government is duplicitously claiming that it cannot.

In neither case has anyone these shown me that they deserve the keys.

But while we figure out how to deal with the charmingly erratic nature of the Palestinian polity, we need to do so from a position that is sustainable – militarily, economically, politically, and morally. And I’ve gotta question whether the current policies – of quietly burying a huge budget to subsidize people to move into the settlements, while talking about handing them back to the Palestinians – are sustainable on any of those grounds.

Militarily, the original justification for settlements was they would provide 24/7 sets of Israeli eyes to assure that there would be no pre-invasion buildup. Between satellite imagery and Predators, that justification seems pretty much evaporated at this point. I have to believe that in the face of constant, low-intensity attacks such as we are seeing now, the settlements cost a great deal more in readiness than they provide.

Economically, the Haaretz articles seem to speak for themselves.

Politically, I used to think that the slowly growing settlements were a ploy to induce the Arab world to hurry up and negotiate – if they waited too long, there wouldn’t be any land left over to make into Palestine. It may be that we’re hitting that point now (back to ‘Ruthless People’ again).

But the fact is that Israel has to figure out what to do with the population in the West Bank- having done too little over the last 20 years has created the conditions we see today, in which crazed leaders can make strapping on a Semtex belt seem like a sensible thing to do.

I have come to believe that Israel should either annex the Territories and deport anyone who objects – and take the political conseuences, which I believe would be catastrophic – or find a way to give them up. Neither of those processes is helped by this current policy of accretion.

And morally, it’s hard to look at the policy of settlements while negotiating to give it back without a certain level of repugnance. It’s duplicitious at best, while a public and absolute freeze on settlements – and even a meaningful rollback of some of the less-defensible ones – would at a time of profound Arab weakness, should be seen as a sincere act and demonstration of good faith.

M. Simon emailed the following in response to my intial snippet of a comment:

To Armed Liberal,

Since the comments are broken I have this reply about settlements.

If Arabs and Muslims living in Israel are no obstacle to peace please explain how Jews living in the Palestinian territories are an obstacle to peace?

If that is not good enough then you might consider that for a peace deal that was real Israel has dismantled settlements in the past. Why wouldn’t they do it again?

Settlements are an imaginary obstacle. Land is not being taken from Arabs. Land which once belonged to the Jordanian government (which they have long since renounced) is being used.

Simon

And I owe him a reply.

First, and foremost, the Arabs who live in Israel do so freely as members of the Israeli community – they are subject to israeli laws, participate in the israeli economy, and do so with the free and full consent of the Israeli government. Settlers live in enclaves, subject to Israeli law rather than what passes for Palestinian law, and do so over the protest of much of Palestinian society. If Arab governments bought or expropriated (as Israel has done to property once owned by the Jordanian or Egyptina governments) land and built enclaves for Palestinians within Israel, subject to Jordanian law, the people of Israel would be rightly outraged. Why is it different for the Arabs?

Yes, they can be dismantled for a peace deal, but I’ve got to believe that as they and the people who live in them get more and more entrenched it will be less and less possible to do so every year. And personally, I’d rather see the $500 million/year spent more constructively by being offered directly as a bribe to the Palestinians for peace.

Fred Lapides also blogged this at Israpundit