Sublime

Bush’s support for Israel had, in fact, emboldened Olmert to propose establishing a viable Palestinian state—an offer ignored by Mahmoud Abbas.

“Our problem is not that the Palestinians are not a people,” I told Kerry’s advisors. “It’s that they’re not a people ready to sustain statehood. Help them follow Israel’s model of creating viable institutions first and then erecting the state on top of them.”

After a mere six weeks, 1,069 Arabs, 769 Jews, and 123 Britons had died.

Netanyahu did follow through on Israel’s commitment (as stipulated in the 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Peace Agreement, also known as Oslo II) to redeploy from Hebron, then the last West Bank city under Israeli control. Under American pressure, Netanyahu also later signed the 1998 Wye River Memorandum, designed to resume implementation of the stalled O

2007 he opened a factory in Mishor Adumim in the West Bank, which employed 1,100 workers—850 Palestinians and 250 Jews—a beautiful tapestry of the region working together every day. The social justice keyboard warriors of BDS got a whiff of this blasphemous coexistence, and their manic base was activated.

For the past century, perhaps for much longer, a deep ambivalence has cast its shadow over Jewish life.