Such as what price? Before or after we cease our dependency on Arab oil?

The Arab masses are not going to be pleased with any deal short of the ideal, but they’re going to have to lump it. And the Arab governments are going to pay some price for having spun up those masses in a quest for the impossible.

The Arabs have as much right to return to “Palestine” as the Germans have to return to the Sudetenland.

That is, none whatsoever.

That’s always the question ain’t it?

But if you ask me swallowing poison isn’t much of a meal. It don’t do much for the digestion either.

Who’s first?

I say, “Always prepare for the easy open, but if it doesn’t work, then have a real can opener ready for action.”

It pays to be prepared, because assumptions are like miracles. It’s good when they happen, just don’t plan on their timely arrival.

I am going to read your article and get reacquainted with your blog and come back and comment some more.

UPDATED: John, I read your article (and fixed the URL link on your comment), and I must tell you I agree with you about the need in principle to “swallow poison” — in principle. In practice, it is not even what Saudi Arabia suggested — it is clearly very committed to the “right of return” (for Arabs in Palestine, not for Jews expelled from Arab countries). The problem with this formulation, however, is that there is a far greater imbalance of risk in that diet than most of your readers seem willing to appreciate. In short, the Arab world is suggesting it would have been better to accept the 1948 partition plan because, after all, it seems that it won’t be so easy to get rid of the Jews.

You suggest all that has happened since then is bitter water that must be allowed to flow under the bridge — but it is more than that. I agree with you that wrongs will never be righted, and that the goal must be to find a way to live side by side in some tolerable way. The 1948 plan was premised, because of the high degree of strategic vulnerability, on immediate and essentially complete mutual toleration. The ensuing 60 years have demonstrated that this could not exist. Those 1948 borders are utterly indefensible. Meanwhile, the Arabs have only become radicalized — it is almost an understatement — to an extent not even imaginable in 1948, when even contemporary Arab leaders who suggested coexistence were assassinated. What good are the signatures of governments that have spent two generations demonizing the Jews on a level comparable to the Nazis (a phenomenon you recognize) when the “Arab street,” including the Palestinians whose territory is now to be essentially interwoven into Jewish Palestine, have grown up on more than a half a century of bloodllust?

Israel would have been wise, as cynical as it sounds, to call Arabia’s bluff here, though. In fact Syria, Iran and the remaining ultra-rejectionists would not and could not have signed such an agreement. Nor would the Hamas government of Arab Palestine.

That doesn’t mean I have a solution. I don’t. I actually believe in land for peace, not because it is right or even, in every instance, strategically wise, but because Israel is at a long-term strategic and political disadvantage in so many ways that it has little choice but to surrender tactically where it can to preserve resources. But the concept of “agree to our conditions” as a premise of negotiations is preposterous unless, as I suggest, the entire exercise is not really a sincere endeavor anyway.

I refer you to the op-ed I co-authored with David Perlmutter in Asharq Alawsat last year.

I also call your attention to the desperation for a solution to this problem that is evidenced in Arab media across the region. There’s lots of it to be read at my blog.