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I didn't have a chance to comment on the revelations that foreign-policy insider Peter Galbraith received a 5 percent stake in an oil field in the Dohak region of Iraqi Kurdistan, for his role in helping the Norwegian oil company DNO negotiate drilling rights there. Galbraith was also involved in the constitutional negotiations that gave the Kurds substantial autonomy over the region and thus made the proposed deal possible, and the Times reports that he could make roughly $100 million or so for his efforts.

Not surprisingly, the exposure of Galbraith's dealings has caused some controversy in Iraq, though remarkably little in Washington  One of the Iraqi participants said "the idea that an oil company was participating in the drafting of the Iraqi Constitution leaves me speechless," and the whole business is bound to reinforce the widespread (and in my view, false) belief that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a "war for oil. " 

Galbraith is publicly unrepentant, arguing that his deal with DNO was arranged while he was a private citizen and declaring that "What is true is that I undertook business activities that were entirely consistent with my long-held policy views. . . I believe my work with [DNO and other companies] helped create the Kurdistan oil industry which helps provide Kurdistan an economic base for the autonomy its people almost unanimously desire. . . So, while I may have had interests, I see no conflict."

Of course, as a number of other critics quickly pointed out, the problem is not that Galbraith is in line to receive millions of dollars in compensation; the problem is that he failed to disclose his financial interests while he was busy writing op-eds and articles and engaging in other public activities on behalf of Kurdish autonomy. His behavior is no different than a medical researcher who takes millions of dollars from a pharmeceutical company and then writes articles or offers expert testimony about the efficacy of that company's products. The testimony may be entirely consistent with the scientist's "long-held views," but anyone exposed to the testimony has a right to know about the potential conflict of interest.

The whole sordid business got me thinking: is there any way to clean up the marketplace of ideas here in the United States?  We are drowning in information and opinion, much of it claiming to be objective and authoritative when it may in fact be inspired and funded by moneyed special interests eager to sell the public a story that advances their particular objectives. Most "think tanks" in Washington portray themselves as objective, quasi-scholarly institutions (indeed, they increasingly give researchers endowed chairs and other quasi-academic titles), but unlike most universities, most think tanks remain heavily dependent on "soft money" and are bound to be especially sensitive to what potential donors might be thinking. And some of them aren't really scholarly at all; they are just public relations operations or "letterhead organizations" seeking to mold public opinion and push the policy process in a particular direction. But unless you know who's paying for it, it's hard to decide who's giving you an honest opinion and who is just shilling for some powerful interest group.

Can we tame this beast without infringing on free speech?

Here's a suggestion: let's start by asking participants in the war of ideas to provide a lot more information about their financial dealings. The SEC requires companies to make relevant financial information available to investors; why shouldn't those who provide information in the public arena provide a similar level of disclosure to those who "invest" in their alleged expertise? We don't have to pass a law requiring think tanks or pundits to disclose the details of their funding arrangements to the public; as a first step, we could simply rank different organizations and individuals on the level of disclosure they provide, much as other groups help potential donors rate charitable organizations on their administrative efficiency. 

For example, think tanks could be ranked according to their willingness to provide lists of their funding sources, specifying both the sources of the funding and the specific projects that the donors paid for. Wouldn't you like to know who is bankrolling the American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, Center for American Progress, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Brookings Institution, Council on Foreign Relations, Hudson Institute, Middle East Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, Institute for the Study of War, the Federation of American Scientists, or the New America Foundation? 

Such groups shouldn't make us dig for the information; they could just put it all out on their websites. Lord knows that these groups work overtime disseminating reports, testimony, op-eds and policy memos; surely it is not too much to ask them to tell us who is providing the wherewithal. Organizations that come clean could get a 5-star rating, and journalists and citizens who get exposed to their "analysis" could attach the appropriate discount to whatever they were being fed.

Or take this idea a step further: why not ask prominent pundits and commentators to provide similar disclosure, and rate them for their transparency as well? Where do David Brooks, Juan Cole, Ann Coulter, Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Goldfarb, Michelle Malkin, Matt Yglesias, Richard Perle, Steve Clemons, Fred Kagan, or George Will get their money? How much is salary, and how much is derived from honoraria, royalties, or consulting work? And who's paying the bills? 

Please understand that I'm not criticizing these organizations for accepting contributions from any legitimate source, and I'm not suggesting that commentators shouldn't supplement their income through various outside activities. This is America, where, making a buck is a perfectly worthy enterprise. Nor am I suggesting that think tanks and pundits are just selling their opinions to the highest bidder; more commonly, outside groups pay for someone's services because they already know what he or she thinks and they want to support it or consume it (i.e., by hiring a well-known pundit to give a talk). My point is simply that consumers of a think tank's products or a public intellectual's work have a right to know who is paying for their activities, so that they can take that fact into account.  

Nor am I proposing that full (or even partial) disclosure be a requirement for bloggers, journalists, pundits, or essayists who engage in public debate. Needless to say, that would be a gross infringement of free speech.  My proposal is much more modest: we should start asking about their sources of support, and somebody ought to keep track of how different people answer it.  Any commentator or public intellectual who wants to keep their financial information strictly private is free to do so. But if they do, then we are entitled to ask if they have something to hide, and to rank them lower than those who are willing to divulge their backers.

Am I willing to practice what I preach? Sure. For the current year, for example, about 80 percent of my income is my salary from Harvard. Harvard pays me to teach courses, advise students, administer a research program, and serve on various school committees, and it also expects me to publish research on various public policy issues. I like to think that I'm pulling my weight in each of these areas.

The remainder of my earnings comes from service as the academic consultant to the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, writing this blog, co-editing a book series, and assorted royalties and honoraria (mostly for giving talks or writing articles). The latter, by the way, is almost all from universities or citizens' groups, although I also got some modest compensation for participating (along with a bunch of other scholars) in a workshop series funded by the National Intelligence Council. 

So far, nobody has offered me a stake an oil-field.  If anybody does, I'll let you know right away.

Andrew Sullivan wonders “why can’t Israel just declare that it’s a nuclear power?" Good question. I’ve never had much problem with Israel having a nuclear arsenal myself -- if I were Israeli, I’d want one too. Nor am I surprised that they don’t want their neighbors to follow suit, because that’s basically been our position too.  The United States would clearly prefer to be the only country with nuclear weapons; the problem is that it’s difficult-to-impossible to maintain a nuclear monopoly in perpetuity without fighting a lot of preventive wars.  And the same goes for Israel too.  

As for Israel’s policy of nuclear ambiguity -- “we will not be first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East, but we will not be second” -- it was probably an effective ploy for awhile. It was easier for some Arab governments to live with the asymmetry if Israel wasn’t bragging about it, and it allowed the U.S. and the Europeans to turn a blind eye to the problem in various non-proliferation forums. See Sullivan's follow up here.  But this polite fiction lost its hexing power some time ago, and now it just looks disingenuous. More importantly, refusing to come clean isn’t affecting anyone’s calculations today, and certainly not in the places that matter most (like Tehran).

There is a substantial literature addressing Sullivan’s original question, and a good place to start is Shai Feldman’s Israeli Nuclear Deterrence (Columbia University Press, 1981). Its core argument was straightforward: 1) nuclear deterrence works, especially for the protection of a state’s core territory; 2) other governments in the region understand this, and there’s every reason to believe deterrence would work in the Middle East; 3) Israel should openly declare its nuclear capability and adopt an explicit policy of deterrence; and 4) relying more heavily on deterrence would reduce the importance of strategic depth and facilitate Israel’s withdrawal from the Occupied Territories as part of a regional peace agreement. Note that Feldman was writing back when Iraq and Syria were still Soviet client states, when there was no peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, and when Israel’s economy was much smaller. Of course, that was also before there were half a million Israelis living outside the 1967 borders.  

Today, one could argue that the Israeli government could reassure its citizens about a possible “existential” threat from Iran by advertising its own far more impressive nuclear capability and reminding its that any Iranian attack on Israel would be an act of national suicide. The problem, of course, is that calling attention to Israel’s existing arsenal weakens the case for opposing Iran’s nuclear programs. And that might be part of the answer to Sullivan’s query: Israel can’t declare that it is a nuclear weapons state when it’s trying to convince the rest of the world that it's totally illegitimate for Iran to become one too. 

For a history of Israel’s nuclear program, check out Avner Cohen’s Israel and the Bomb. And for a qualified defense of Israel’s policy of ambiguity, see Ze’ev Maoz, “The Mixed Blessing of Israel’s Nuclear Policy,” in the Fall 2003 issue of International Security.  

A couple of commenters suggested that my previous post on the Harman affair was adopting a "guilty until proven innocent" approach. Not true. I did say that I wasn't buying the spin offered by some of her defenders, but that doesn't mean I accept the CQ story as gospel either. I made two main points: 1) the idea that Harman might have traded favors in the manner implied by the CQ story had a certain prima facie plausibility (which doesn’t mean was in fact true, of course), and 2) that I hoped more information would become available so that we could determine what actually occurred. I also said I hoped that the transcript of the conversation between Harman would be released, so that we could all know exactly what was said (and to whom). Representative Harman agrees, and has now called for the transcript of the wiretapped calls to be made public. I hope it is.

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You know your opponents are worried when they start calling you names.

Jonathan Chait says I'm "paranoid," that I "went bonkers" in a recent blog post, and that my scholarship is "wildly hyperbolic." He says his real objection to Charles Freeman's appointment as chair of the National Intelligence Council is that Freeman is an "ideological fanatic" (isn't it odd that this quality went undetected during Freeman's lengthy career as a public servant?) and that Freeman's other critics were mostly worried about his relations with Saudi Arabia (as if this had nothing to do with their views on other aspects of our Middle East policy). Nice try, but it is abundantly clear to almost everyone that the assault on Freeman has been conducted by individuals -- Chait included -- who are motivated by their commitment to Israel and who are upset that Freeman has criticized some of its past behavior. Of course Chait doesn't broadcast this openly, as it would immediately undermine the case he's trying to make.

As for the others, Michael Goldfarb compares me to Father Coughlin and says I assembled a "blacklist," when in fact I did no such thing. I'm not suggesting that Freeman's critics should lose their jobs or face other forms of  persecution; I just pointed out what they were doing and said it was wrong. Read what I actually wrote, and then ask yourself why Goldfarb would make this up.  Perhaps he's confusing me with Ron Radosh, who did call for the New York Times to fire Roger Cohen for writing a column about Iran that didn't demonize it. Jeffrey Goldberg says that my co-author and I are "viciously anti-Israel," even though we have consistently declared our support for a Jewish state, said we "admired its many achievements," and wrote that the United States "should come to Israel's aid if its survival is ever in jeopardy." M.J. Rosenberg challenges Freeman's critics too, and Goldberg labels him a "professional slander expert."

What explains the false claims and overheated rhetoric these pundits employ? Why can't Chait and his allies represent their opponents' views accurately, and deploy facts and logic instead of invective and character assassination?

Answer: because the case they are defending is so weak. Not the case for Israel's existence, which virtually everyone engaged in these debates supports (including Freeman himself), but the case for continuing to give Israel nearly unconditional backing, even when it continues to build settlements in the Occupied Territories and when its newly-elected leaders openly declare their opposition to a two-state solution, which was the preferred outcome of the Clinton and Bush administrations and is now the stated goal of the Obama administration. Because the case for never criticizing Israel and backing it no matter what it does makes little strategic or moral sense, advocates of that approach have no choice but to misrepresent their opponent's arguments, and to try to portray them as wild-eyed extremists (i.e., "ideological fanatics" or "paranoid"), in an attempt to marginalize them. It never seems to occur to them that what we really have here is a straightforward policy disagreement, and that the policies they prefer might actually be harmful to Israel and the United States.  

Their tactics used to work pretty well, but more and more people understand and resent the game that Israel's hardline supporters are playing. But Messrs. Chait, Goldfarb, and Goldberg don't get this. They don't understand that their mean-spirited fulminations are undermining their own case, much as a loudmouth hogging the mike at a public meeting turns off the rest of the audience. So it's hard to get too upset at all the name-calling. As Napoleon once said, "when your opponent is making a very serious mistake, don’t be impolite and disturb him."  

P.S. The Washington Times reports today that Freeman's appointment is going to be vetted by the DNI's Inspector General, to make sure there are no disqualifying conflicts of interest. I see nothing wrong with that, provided he is judged by the same standards as other government officials in similar roles. The article also quotes several former NIC members who support the vetting process but believe "It has to be looked at, but I don't see anything to disqualify him," and that Freeman "should be a fine choice." 

A quick follow-up to Tuesday's post about U.S. options if the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict becomes unworkable.

Several commenters suggested that even the presence of 500,000+ Israeli settlers outside the 1967 border is not an insurmountable obstacle to a two-state solution, because even that large number could be moved back to Israel in the context of a peace deal or and the majority of the settlers could actually be incorporated inside a redrawn border with the Palestinians receiving land of equal value in some sort of swap. This is certainly true in theory, but it gets harder with each additional settler and as Israeli opinion shifts rightward. Hamas' growing popularity is obviously another significant obstacle, and these two trends are reinforcing each other right now.  Nothing is impossible in politics, I guess, but movement is in the wrong direction at present and it is hard for me to imagine it reversing in the absence of strong outside pressure.

Matt Yglesias suggests I may be underestimating Israel's ability to retain U.S. support even if the two-state solution is abandoned and Israel creates a de facto apartheid state. He may be right -- especially in the short term -- but it is going to be a much harder sell, because this outcome is so at odds with American values and because discourse on these topics is becoming more open, even among Israel's supporters here in the United States. Matt himself is a good example of this phenomenon, and he's not alone. He's correct that the United States tolerated apartheid in South Africa for a long time and for a host of not-very-convincing Cold War reasons, but we weren't sending South Africa billions of dollars of aid every year and the geopolitical consequences of that policy were not as significant. (Southern Africa was never as important a strategic interest as the Middle East is). Over time, it will hard to sustain the current "special relationship" if the apartheid scenario comes to pass, and all the more so once the Arab population of greater Israel exceeds the Jewish population. That's the scenario that Prime Minister Olmert has been warning against, and it ought to be giving fresh energy to our diplomatic efforts now. It is this scenario that has motivated groups like J Street, and more hardline organizations like AIPAC ought to be thinking hard about it too and reconsidering their own positions.

The question is: what can they do to help Israel achieve a genuine and workable two-state solution and thus avoid all these worrisome alternatives?

For advice on what Obama should do, check out Ben-Gurion University professor Neve Gordon's new essay in The Nation. I'd be more optimistic if the new administration didn't have too much on their plate already. Obama's team doesn't just need to prove they can walk and chew gum at the same time; sometimes it looks like they need to walk, chew gum, juggle three eggs, compose a string quartet, dance a jig (or if you prefer, the hora), cook a five-course banquet, rotate the tires, wind-surf, and play slide guitar -- all at once.

BAZ RATNER/AFP/Getty Images

Over at the Atlantic web Site, Megan McArdle and Ross Douthat spent part of last week engaged in a lengthy discussion of the situation in Gaza and the role of the Israel lobby, with Andrew Sullivan chiming in briefly. This is one sense gratifying, because John Mearsheimer and I decided to write about the lobby in order to encourage more open discussion of a subject that had become something of a taboo here in the United States, especially in mainstream foreign policy circles.

I won't get into all the details of their exchanges (which included an interesting discussion of various counterfactuals and other examples of ethnic politics), but I did want to raise one question. Although Douthat and McArdle offer a number of critical appraisals of our work on this subject, did anyone else noticed that the discussion of our book never contained any concrete evidence that the participants have actually read it? In his entries, for example, Ross Douthat denounced it as "tendentious, simplistic and wrong" and suggests that we "echo tropes of classical anti-semitism." He's welcome to his opinion and is of course free to express them on his blog, but he has yet to offer a single specific quotation or concrete example from the actual book to buttress his case. So far, his only evidence are references to other people who reviewed the book and didn't like it.

Although more sympathetic to our position, Megan McAardle says that we "tend to assume conspiracy where affinity is a better explanation," even though, as detailed below, we repeatedly rejected any notion of "conspiracy" and instead described the lobby as a normal American interest group, albeit an unusually influential one. So I am beginning to wonder if they have actually read the book.

The problem with relying on other people's opinions is that virtually all of the mainstream critics here in the US misrepresented our arguments badly, frequently accusing us of saying the exact opposite of what we actually wrote. At the risk of boring you, let me offer a few examples:

1. As I pointed out last week, we wrote that the various groups that comprise the Israel lobby are "engaged in good old-fashioned interest group politics, which is as American as apple pie,” and we repeatedly stressed that "lobbying on Israel's behalf is wholly legitimate." Apart from a regrettable tendency to try to silence critics or to smear them as anti-Semites, we even said that the tactics employed by the main groups in the lobby "are reasonable, and simply part of the normal rough-and tumble that is the essence of democratic politics" (pp. 5, 13, 147, 185). In fact, we also expressed the hope that pro-Israel forces in the United States would remain active in politics, but begin to advocate policies that would be better for the U.S. and Israel alike (pp. 352-55). Nonetheless, Jeffrey Goldberg's review in The New Republic called our book “the most sustained attack...against the political enfranchisement of American Jews since the era of Father Coughlin."

2. We defined the lobby as a "loose coalition of groups and individuals who actively work to move American foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction," and we emphasized that our definition "does not mean that every American with favorable attitudes towards Israel is a member of the lobby." Instead, we wrote that to qualify as part of the lobby one had to "actively work" to strengthen and defend the "special relationship" of nearly-unconditional support that now exists between the U.S. and Israel (pp. 5, 113-14). There are therefore plenty of Americans who have favorable attitudes toward Israel who are not part of the "Israel lobby." Yet Walter Russell Mead falsely charged that "Mearsheimer and Walt have come up with a definition of the 'Israel lobby' that covers the waterfront, including everyone from Jimmy Carter and George Soros to Paul Wolfowitz and Tom Delay."

3. We wrote that "the Israel lobby is not a cabal or conspiracy or anything of the sort" and repeated this assertion five times (pp. 5, 13, 112, 114, 131, 150). Nonetheless, Ruth Wisse published an op-ed in the Washington Post saying that "Mearsheimer and Walt allege that a Jewish cabal dictates U.S. policy in the Middle East, helping Israeli interests and hurting U.S. ones."

4. We wrote that "we are not challenging Israel's right to exist or questioning the legitimacy of the Jewish state," adding that we believed "the United States should stand willing to come to Israel's assistance if its survival were in jeopardy." We also wrote that we "support its right to exist, admire Israel's many achievements, [and] want its citizens to lead secure and prosperous lives" (pp. 11-12, 113, 341-342). Nonetheless, former Israeli Ambassador Itamar Rabinovich falsely claimed that our book "not only expressed criticism of Israel's policy but also questioned its legitimacy."

5. Leslie Gelb's review of our book in The New York Times referred repeatedly to a "Jewish lobby," even though we never used that phrase ourselves and explicitly argued that it was an inappropriate and misleading term (p. 115). It is inappropriate because many American Jews do not "actively work" to support the special relationship and because some individuals and groups that do actively work in this way (such as the "Christian Zionists") aren't Jewish. Gelb's mischaracterization (and his review's title, "Dual Loyalties,") made it sound like we were directing our criticisms at an entire ethnic group and hinting its members were disloyal, which is of course false.

6. Even David Remnick, whose comment in the New Yorker was one of the more fair-minded mainstream appraisals, said that "Mearsheimer and Walt give you the sense that, if the Israelis and the Palestinians come to terms, bin Laden will return to the family construction business." In fact, we said the opposite. After documenting how the Israel-Palestinian conflict had influenced bin Laden’s attitudes and aided terrorist recruitment, we wrote that “U.S. support for Israel is hardly the only source of anti-Americanism in the Arab and Islamic world" and noted that the issue of Palestine was "not their only grievance." As we emphasized, "some Islamic radicals are genuinely upset by what they regard as the West's materialism and venality, its alleged "theft" of Arab oil, its support for corrupt Arab monarchies, [and] its repeated military interventions in the region, etc." (pp. 65-70). We also stated that "Israeli-Palestinian peace is not a wonder drug will solve all the region's problems; it will by itself neither eliminate anti-Semitism in the region nor lead Arab elites to tackle the other problems that afflict their societies" (p. 348).

I could go on, but you get the point. Given this array of misstatements and distortions (most of them in highly visible publications), it is not surprising that other pundits formed a negative impression of the book, which is no doubt what our critics intended.

Here it is perhaps worth mentioning that the book also contains: 1) lengthy and explicit denunciations of the "shameful legacy" of anti-Semitism; 2) a frank discussion of the bogus charge of "dual loyalty," which we describe as a "canard" and an "anti-Semitic slander," adding that “any notion that Jewish Americans are disloyal citizens is wrong” (p. 147); and 3) an acknowledgement that the long history of anti-Semitism makes it understandably hard to discuss this subject in a calm or dispassionate way. We knew full well that we were entering a minefield, and went to considerable lengths to make it clear what we were saying and what we weren't.

Contrary to various other charges, we also wrote that the lobby does not "control" U.S. foreign policy (though it does have considerable influence) and we did not advance a "mono-causal" explanation for U.S. Middle East policy, including the controversial decision to invade Iraq. With respect to the latter, we argue that pressure from the neoconservatives (an influential element of the broader interest group) was a necessary but not sufficient condition for war (a point that many other authors and public figures have made) and we emphasized that the neocons could not cause the war by themselves. America's dominant global position was a crucial contextual factor, 9/11 was a key precipitating event, and it was Bush and Cheney who made the ultimate decision for war. We also make it clear that the war wasn't Israel's idea (they were in fact initially opposed), although key Israeli leaders eventually jumped on board and helped sell it here in the United States. The book's conclusion calls for a more normal relationship between the United States and Israel, which we believe would be better for both countries. And to repeat, we also express the hope that supporters of Israel here in the United States will remain actively engaged in the political process in order to help bring about that much-needed change.

Unfortunately, you wouldn’t know most of these things about our book if you relied on mainstream reviews in the United States or the recent discussion at the Atlantic web Site. It doesn't have to be that way, of course: it's entirely possible to take issue with some of our arguments while representing them fairly. For an example of how this is done, watch for Jerome Slater's forthcoming essay in the Winter 2009 issue of the scholarly journal Security Studies. Slater agrees with us on some issues and disagrees strongly on others, but the key point is that he does this in a fair-minded way and for the most part portrays our claims accurately.

To step back for a moment, this whole episode illustrates a larger problem with the quality of public discourse here in the United States. Can we expect to address important public policy problems constructively when critics routinely deal with arguments they don’t like in such a misleading fashion, and when prominent pundits seem comfortable lambasting scholarly works they show little sign of having read? If this is the level of "truthiness" that public intellectuals and pundits now aspire to, we are in bigger trouble than I thought, and in ways that go beyond the reaction to any particular book.

To be clear, neither John Mearsheimer nor myself consider our book to be the last word on the subject; that's just not how scholarship works, especially in controversial areas. We welcome open discussion and vigorous debate and we recognize there are aspects of this issue about which reasonable people are bound to disagree. That's fine with us, because lively but fair-minded discussion can help us all figure out where our views might need revision and bring us to a clearer understanding of these difficult issues. But in order to have that sort of exchange, people really do have to read the book first.

Some instructive items that I came across over the weekend:

Here is a link to the full column by Uri Avnery that I excerpted earlier.

Here is Tony Karon (Rootless Cosmopolitan) arguing that Israel has in fact lost this war.

Here is Israeli historian Avi Shlaim's analysis of the origins of the conflict, from the Guardian.

Here is a long post by Jim Sleeper from TPMCafe, offering a sympathetic defense of Israel's existence, questioning the moral posturing of some of its critics, yet concluding that there is urgent need for some "tough love" from its friends. TPMCafe also has some nice posts from Todd Gitlin, Sam Bahour, and MJ Rosenberg.

And finally, here is a link to a Washington Post column by historian/journalist Tom Segev. It's in many ways the most interesting and the most depressing. Segev is a thoughtful man whose past work showed an admirable ability to get beyond the usual patriotic pieties that afflict many writers dealing with sensitive issues of their own country's past. Yet here Segev is describing (and seeming to endorse) a growing Israeli sense that peace is no longer possible, a two-state solution is now beyond reach, and that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should just be "managed." Money quotation:

The friendliest thing that President Obama can do for Israel in the long run would be to induce her to return to her original purpose: to be a Jewish and democratic country. Rather than design another fictitious "road map" for peace, the Obama administration may be more useful and successful by trying merely to manage the conflict, aiming at a more limited yet urgently needed goal: to make life more livable for both Israelis and Palestinians."

I'm not sure what Segev means by that, because "managing" the status quo will just allow further drift in the wrong direction, and the only acceptable way for Israel to remain both Jewish and democratic is a two-state solution. Segev's account suggests a growing sense of fatalism, as if there is simply nothing that can be done about it. If someone with Segev's background really believes this, it does not augur well for the future. (And on this note see Gershom Gorenberg's latest piece for FP's new issue on the crucial role the settlements play in this equation in "The Other Housing Crisis.") Remember what Ehud Olmert said: "if the two-state solution fails, Israel will face a South-Africa style struggle." And if that happens, he warned, "the state of Israel is finished."  

Courtesy of the Center for American Progress, a very valuable update on the situation, with lots of useful weblinks.