A good summation

Salon's Gary Kamiya:

Annapolis will fail to make peace between Israelis and Palestinians because it was not intended to succeed. It was a charade. And in the Middle East, charades don't just leave things the way they are -- they make them much worse. The tragedy is that Olmert seems to realize the urgency of cutting a two-state deal. But there is a giant gap between seeing the goal and achieving it, and only the United States can fill it. Olmert can take the politically explosive yet necessary steps only if the United States clearly states in advance what needs to be done and then forces both sides to do it. Bush completely failed to do that. He called for the conference almost in passing. He never set an agenda. He refused to outline what the U.S. vision of peace is. Going forward, the only thing he offered the two beleaguered leaders, Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, was a promise to monitor the process -- which in these circumstances is like promising a dying man that if he calls you on your cellphone, you'll be sure to check the message.

The sad thing about this mess is that there's no mystery about what needs to happen. Both Israel and the Palestinians must give up some of their most cherished dreams. The 40-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands must end. East Jerusalem must become the capital of a contiguous Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders. Those will be bitter concessions for Israel, but the Palestinians must give up even more. They must accept a state that comprises only 22 percent of the historic Palestine. They probably must allow the largest settlements on the West Bank to become part of Israel. And most painfully of all, they must accept a compromise on Palestinian refugees that will resettle most of them outside their ancestral homes in what is now Israel.

But neither Bush nor Condoleezza Rice have ever been interested in brokering a fair and lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. After all, this is the president who announced at his first National Security Council meeting that he was going to let Ariel Sharon have a free hand to smash the Palestinians because "sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify things." This is the Secretary of State who prevented the U.N. from imposing a cease-fire on Israel in the last weeks of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war and infamously defended the carnage as the "birth pangs of a new Middle East."

When humanity prevails.

It's not often that genuinely good news comes out of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Today, there is some. It's small, but it's huge.

As the Associated Press reports:

Palestinian police rescued an Israeli soldier Monday after he mistakenly drove into this West Bank town and was surrounded by a mob that later burned his car. Israel praised the rescue as a sign of the growing strength of Palestinian moderates.

It's more than that. It has nothing to do with moderation or extremism, it has to do with humanity.

One of the reasons people hate I/P blogging is that they're often mere shitfests about who did what horrible thing to whom. I have no use for such diaries. I've said it many times: the two sides are at war, and when there is a war, people do horrible things to each other. Blaming one side or the other, or wanting to punish one side or the other, accomplishes nothing. Broadcasting every atrocity only fans the flames of hatred. As long as there is a war, there will be atrocities. That's a given.

The only issue that matters is how we can help foster peace. The only way to foster peace is to stop exacerbating the hatred, to stop fueling the justifiable paranoia that permeates both populations, and to try to understand that both sides have been severely traumatized- by each other, by their own failed leaders, by the U.S. and Europe, by other Arab and Muslim nations, and by the wider world. The Israeli and Palestinian people have been but pawns in much larger geopolitical machinations, and what they need is compassion, understanding, and a chance to move forward. That's why I love this little story.

The rescue was a sharp contrast to seven years ago when two Israeli army reservists strayed into the West Bank city of Ramallah. They were captured by Palestinian police, who took them to a police station. A mob stormed the station and killed the two, throwing one body from a second story window as news photographers took pictures.

That incident, known to shocked Israelis as "the lynching," set the tone for violence and suspicion that has continued ever since.

Exactly right. When people outside the world of politics behave with such inhumanity, it speaks to the degree to which they have been dehumanized. Today's story says something else. These Palestinian cops could have easily turned away. They could have seen the Israeli soldier as a uniformed enemy who deserved whatever horrible fate befell him. They didn't. They saw him as a human being.

It is the common humanity of the Israelis and the Palestinians that has been bludgeoned. It is only the common humanity of the Israelis and the Palestinians that can save them. It's not about politics, it's about people. Today, one Israeli soldier is safe with the people he loves. Today, a group of Palestinian police officers are heroes. With all the horror pervading that region and the world, it's worth recognizing and celebrating such heroes.

Olmert learns from Bush

Bloomberg:

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert blamed his former military chief of staff for telling him that the army was prepared enough to defeat Hezbollah before he sent troops into Lebanon last July.

In testimony released today by the government commission studying the five-week conflict, Olmert also described the political confusion during the six months after former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had a crippling stroke and he took over.

Of course. Nothing's ever the fault of the guy at the top of the food chain.

Very cool!

Reuters:

An ancient staircase used in a royal funeral procession led an Israeli archaeologist to solve a 2,000-year-old mystery, the location of the tomb of the Roman-anointed "King of the Jews," Herod the Great.

Hebrew University archaeologist Ehud Netzer said on Tuesday he had found the sarcophagus of the king, who ruled Judea from about 37 BC until his death in 4 BC, had been smashed, most likely by Jews who rebelled against Rome from 66 to 72 AD.

Speaking at a news conference a day after the university announced the discovery, Netzer said the monarch's remains most likely disappeared when the rebels raided the tomb at Herodium, where Herod's fortress palace once stood, near Jerusalem.