I DON'T think Daniel Larison is sticking up enough for himself in his debate with Ross Douthat over films about the Iraq war. Mr Douthat thinks depictions of the invasion and subsequent debacle of an occupation should be more "nuanced" and depict the whole thing as a tragedy of good intentions and unintended consequences. He thinks movies that condemn the invasion as an idiotic spasm of overweening neo-conservative aggression and incompetence have failed artistically because of their hyperbole. Mr Larison thinks that, since the invasion was in fact, on his view, an idiotic spasm of overweening neo-conservative aggression and incompetence, depicting it as anything else would simply be untrue to the record and essentially be an attempt to deflect blame from advocates of the war. Mr Douthat sees his point, to some extent:

When I look at the disastrous period from 2003 till 2006, I see a series of tragedies for which Americans, and in particular the American elite, bear a collective responsibility. When Larison looks at that era, he sees a disastrous policy, with disastrous consequences, that was foisted on America by the Bush administration and its supporters and enablers—which is to say, by people like me. And all my talk about the need for art that admits of nuance, that allows for good intentions, and that leaves room for real tragedy sounds to him like so much self-justification. 

This is understandable, and fair enough. But I’d still challenge Larison to sit through a movie marathon composed of “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “Rendition,” “Syriana,” “Redacted,” “Lions for Lambs,” “W.,” “In The Valley of Elah,” and “Green Zone” and not walk out admitting that I have at least something of a point.

Mr Larison replies:

I do think Ross has 'something of a point' as far as his critique of the films is concerned. Happily, I think I will be able to skip the marathon. However, what appeared to me as the most glaring oversight and mistake that Ross made was the neglect of any mention that the flaws that mar these movies are some of the same flaws that helped create the disaster that the movies are inadequately portraying.

I think Mr Larison here undersells at least some of the above films. "Fahrenheit 9/11" was in many ways an excellent film about the American political psyche, if overly conspiratorial in its allegations. "Syriana" was terrific. "In the Valley of Elah" is a beautiful movie, even if it sometimes treads familiar ground. "Redacted", from what I saw of it, was formally exciting. The problem for Ross Douthat is that he can't really even see these films at all; he's too wrapped up in his own political identification with the disastrous decision to go to war. No doubt there were many supporters of America's war in Vietnam who found the 1974 documentary masterpiece "Hearts and Minds" unwatchable left-wing propaganda, who hated "M*A*S*H" and "Apocalypse Now".

The thing is that if you start from the position that these wars were disastrous, incompetent, jingoistic escapades, you're able to perceive all of the other narrative, characterological or aesthetic subtleties and strengths in the films. (Perhaps "Lions for Lambs" and "Green Zone" lack such strengths, as did many mediocre Vietnam War films. But "Valley of Elah", "Syriana" and "Redacted" were very strong films.) If you're still wrapped up in your own guilt over a bad war, though, then all you can see is an accusation against yourself.

(Photo credit: AFP)

PEOPLE seem to agree that David Brooks's op-ed column today is silly, but I am under the illusion that I have something to add to the discussion. The something I believe myself capable of adding is as follows. At the end of the op-ed, Mr Brooks writes:

Once partisan reconciliation is used for this bill, it will be used for everything, now and forever. The Senate will be the House. The remnants of person-to-person relationships, with their sympathy and sentiment, will be snuffed out. We will live amid the relationships of group versus group, party versus party, inhumanity versus inhumanity.

No, we won't. Senators will. Assuming Mr Brooks's apocalyptic vision comes true and inhumanity is pitted against inhumanity (instead of inhumanity cooperating pleasantly with inhumanity, as it presumably does now), I guarantee you that my friends, neighbours and colleagues will continue to be as pleasant and chatty with me as before. Yours will, too. Unless you happen to work in the Senate. Then your working relationships...well, in fact, they'll be just as vicious and partisan as they already are, but if Mr Brooks's assumptions were true instead of false, your working relationships might become somewhat more cliquish and acrimonious.

The thing is, neither I nor any other American voter really care how friendly or cliquish the social atmosphere in the Senate is. What we care about is whether or not the Senate generates good legislation. You could argue the case that more friendly personal relationships in the Senate would generate better legislation, and indeed Evan Bayh does make that argument, with some degree of convincingness. (It's actually easier to argue that the House, with its approximation of Parliamentary-style party-line discipline, has been authoring better legislation faster than the Senate for some years now.) But Mr Brooks doesn't even try to make the case. It's as if he thinks the Senate exists for the social benefit of its members, rather than to serve as an effective legislature for the rest of America. This, to be fair, is an attitude that seems to be shared by many Senators.

(Photo credit: AFP)

LIKE Roger Cohen, I had a meeting with Ron Nachman, the mayor of Ariel, last week. (In fact, Mr Nachman told me he'd come from Mr Cohen's office to mine.) Like Mr Cohen, I was told of Mr Nachman's "Jordanian option": divide the West Bank between Israel and Jordan, each side's salients reaching out to the major (respective) Jewish and Arab populations, interlocking "like a zipper", as Mr Nachman put it. He simply doesn't believe in any Palestinian state whatsoever. (Never mind that the Jordanians in no way want any part of the West Bank or its Palestinians.)

Is Mr Nachman crazy? He's not a member of some far-right party; he is a member of Mr Netanyahu's, Likud. Which brings up the question Mr Cohen asks. Where is Likud's heart, its centre? What does it see as Israel's vital interest? Is Mr Netanyahu, calling for a Palestinian state so shrunken and so humbled (completely demilitarised, with the IDF on its eastern border with Jordan), the left flank of Likud? With Mr Nachman, presumably, on the right? That would mean that the centre of Likud suspects even Mr Netanyahu is an Arab-appeasing softie, and everyone else—Kadima, not to mention Labour (or heaven forbid the New Movement-Meretz)—downright pro-terrorist.

If the centre of the governing party were the centre of Israel, we would be in trouble. There would be no possibility of America joining negotiations to help Israel find a workable two-state solution. Fortunately, that isn't Israel's centre. There is a huge "left", admittedly hardened by Palestinian truculence, violence and continuing anti-Semitic, Israel-deligitimising teaching in Palestinian textbooks, that nonetheless is able to see Israel's present and future for what they are, and is ready to cut a deal. Quiz for Abe Foxman: who said the recent crisis was an "insult to the institution of the presidency, which no American can forgive"? Since Mr Foxman is "shocked and stunned" by America's "gross overreaction", shouldn't the president of the Anti-Defamation League address this obvious anti-Semitic calumny? Its source is Yoel Marcus, writing in Ha'aretz.

Remembering that this is Democracy in America, not Democracy in Israel, let me close with just one wish for my fellow America-based commentators: that Americans could discuss the crisis with the same parameters and the same freedom from character assassination that Israelis can. If that were so, we might just be able to come up with ideas that America, Israel and the Palestinians could all tolerate, and make them the basis of a deal. And fortunately we know what those ideas look like, since Ehud Barak, Yasser Arafat and Bill Clinton got so close in their final go-round at Taba. But if the discussion in America must be so stunted that honest critics of Israel, no matter how historically Zionist (or even Jewish), spend half their time defending themselves from accusations of anti-Semitism, it's gonna be a long peace process.

Update: Speculation here and some (anonymously sourced) White House reporting here that the Obama administration might be trying to crack Shas and Yisrael Beiteinu from the Netanyahu coalition and get Kadima into it instead. That would indeed be a coalition with a centre closer to Israel's, and closer to a deal with the Palestinians, not to mention closer to American interests.

IS THERE something about the nature of contracting out government work in foreign countries that makes it more prone to scandal, fraud, waste, abuse, and lethal criminal stupidity? We've come to accept the idea that Defence Department security contractors may steal hundreds of guns from an Army weapons depot using the name of a South Park character, get drunk and open fire on cars full of unarmed civilians, and be rewarded with new contracts from the Defence Department. We've come to accept the notion (based on allegations) that Defence Department infrastructure contractors may gang-rape female colleagues, that their superiors will cover the crimes up, that neither the Defence Department nor the Justice Department will do much about it, and that American judges will uphold contractual obligations that force the rape victims to settle their cases through arbitration rather than in the courts. (Fortunately the Senate barred the government from hiring companies who use such contracts last fall. Al Franken sponsored the bill. Jeff Sessions called it "a political attack directed against Halliburton". How am I supposed to keep focused on the post I'm writing when I keep coming across stuff that forces me to bang my head against my desk?)

And now, just when you thought it was safe to put out a job tender, along comes Michael Furlong (pictured). Spencer Ackerman tracks down his online bio. Mr Furlong, a civilian contractor, is the "Strategic Planner and Technology Integration Adviser" for the Joint Information Operations Warfare Command at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. He is also allegedly the head of an illegal off-the-books spy operation that used information gathered by reporters working under the impression they were engaged in legitimate journalistic activity, and passed it to combat forces for use in targeting insurgents. The journalist "contractors" who worked for Furlong are livid.

The contractor, Robert Young Pelton, an author who writes extensively about war zones, said that the government hired him to gather information about Afghanistan and that Mr. Furlong improperly used his work. “We were providing information so they could better understand the situation in Afghanistan, and it was being used to kill people,” Mr. Pelton said.

He said that he and Eason Jordan, a former television news executive, had been hired by the military to run a public Web site to help the government gain a better understanding of a region that bedeviled them... Instead, Mr. Pelton said, millions of dollars that were supposed to go to the Web site were redirected by Mr. Furlong toward intelligence gathering for the purpose of attacking militants.

Mr Furlong's activities may or may not have been illegal. They were unquestionably stupid. Journalists are already being killed in war zones at rates above those of previous conflicts; for many of today's insurgent combatants, who have their own online media operations, journalists are no longer considered useful or objective observers. Stunts like this will make it even more dangerous for anyone to cover the war in Afghanistan. Imagine being a journalist stopped at a Taliban checkpoint, showing your press identification, being told by a Taliban soldier that you will be kidnapped because American journalists are often just agents of the US Army or CIA—and knowing the Taliban guy is right.

QUOTE of the weekend:

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's meddling in internal Israeli decisions regarding the development of our capital Jerusalem is uninvited and unhelpful. In fact it is sheer chutzpah. I cannot remember another time that a senior American official deemed it "insulting" when a sovereign nation announced urban zoning decisions regarding its primary city. This is yet another in the disturbing series of counter-productive declarations from the Obama Administration. It is a gratuitous and frankly annoying comment. Secretary Clinton recently embraced the task of helping solve shipping problems of American food products to our shores, yet condemns our right to build homes for Jews in the city of Jerusalem. Jews living in Jerusalem is why Israel exists as a Jewish state. With all due respect, Madam Secretary, forget the gefilte fish for Passover and support our inalienable rights to the Jewish homeland, Israel.

—Danny Danon, MK (Likud) and deputy speaker of the Knesset

AUSTIN FRAKT has asked his readers to suggest responses to my post on just how big administrative costs in the health-care system driven by the fractured private health-insurance system are. Whew! That's a mouthful. Anyway, a couple of his readers have suggested possible responses to the Himmelstein-Woolhandler paper that argued that administrative costs in America suck up 31% of health-care spending. But they're not terribly definitive.

The first is a 1992 paper by Patricia Danzon in Health Affairs. While it mentions some of Mr Himmelstein's and Ms Woolhandler's earlier work, it obviously doesn't address the 2003 paper itself. The main thrust of Ms Danzon's argument seems to be that head-to-head comparisons between the American and Canadian systems are flawed because of "hidden costs" in the Canadian system, chiefly waiting lists and the deadweight loss of funding health insurance through taxes rather than premiums. This may be true, but it makes the argument even more complex by bringing in yet more debatable issues; I was hoping for someone who simply addressed the issue of how to calculate administrative costs in the American system.

The second is a response to Mr Himmelstein and Ms Woolhandler by Henry Aaron, the Brookings Institute economist, in the same 2003 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine in which they published their study. Mr Aaron begins by writing that he, too, thinks the fragmented American system entails absurdly inflated administrative costs:

Like many other observers, I look at the U.S. health care system and see an administrative monstrosity, a truly bizarre mélange of thousands of payers with payment systems that differ for no socially beneficial reason, as well as staggeringly complex public systems with mindboggling administered prices and other rules expressing distinctions that can only be regarded as weird.

However, Mr Aaron thinks the Himmelstein-Woolhandler approach grossly oversimplifies the task of estimating administrative costs. To start with, he thinks they overstate administrative costs by $50 billion (as of 1999) by using the gross difference between American and Canadian per capita administrative spending, rather than expressing the difference as a percentage of each country's health-care spending. That would still yield an estimate that America could save a whopping 14.3% of its health-care costs on reduced administration alone by switching to a Canadian-style single-payer system, if the rest of the calculation is correct. But Mr Aaron thinks it isn't; he thinks that complications like disparities in wages between clinical and administrative staff, institutional differences, and so on make it almost impossible to compare the two systems. Finally, he says,

The most important question is what these differences should tell policy makers. I believe the answer is, “Not much.”...The U.S. health care administration, weird though it may be, exists for fundamental reasons, including a pervasive popular distrust of centralized authority, a federalist governmental structure, insistence on individual choice (even when, as it appears to me, choice sometimes yields no demonstrable benefit), the continuing and unabated power of large economic interests, and the virtual impossibility (during normal times in a democracy whose Constitution potentiates the power of dissenting minorities) of radically restructuring the nation’s largest industry — an industry as big as the entire economy of France.

This seems to me like a very strange thing to say. Obviously different countries have different health-insurance systems for deep-rooted historical reasons, but to use that as a reason to refuse to make any cross-country comparisons is a rather self-defeating thing for a social scientist to do. I was really hoping that Mr Aaron might have simply suggested some better ways to compare administrative costs between private and single-payer health-insurance systems. As for the declaration of defeat in the face of path dependency, it appears at the moment that Mr Aaron was too pessimistic. Health-care reform now depends on a few wavering votes in the House. It may not make it. But reforming America's health-care industry doesn't seem to be "virtually impossible". It's just very, very hard. Given the long-term budget picture, it actually seems pretty much inevitable.

ONE more note on this week's sacred-values debate. Commenter ccusa, in response to my initial post, says that we can't separate values from politics:

You can see this fact in the blog author's sentences, for example: "America is in some sense trying to determine the most efficient and equitable way to extend health-care insurance to the largest number of people possible, without sacrificing too much in terms of costs or quality." To this challenge, the blog author wonders how this challenge somehow got wrapped up in questions involving "sacred" values. Yet, the blog author himself says it has to be equitable (i.e., comply with a concept of fairness, rightness as opposed to wrongness, also called ethics, sometimes called the "moral" or "right" thing to do).

My colleague makes a similar point: 

But it may also simply be naive to believe that values-based debates can be held out of the political sphere, since conflicts over values are extremely effective at mobilising voters to engage in political activity.

Fair points both. Maybe the response is that we need to separate the normative stances from the sacred ones. That is, there are some issues on which you hold a moral belief that allows for compromise, and others on which to even admit a potential for compromise would be a form of sin. People may have different sacred issues, and an issue might be sacred for one person but "merely" moral for another. Suppose, for example, I oppose capital punishment because I think it is intrinsically wrong to take human life (a sacred value), but you oppose it because of class and racial disparities in its application (moral). And then if a third person opposes the death penalty because the lengthy appeals process ends up costing the system more than giving them a life sentence, we could consider that a simply pragmatic view.

One other comment regarding abortion, which I offered as an example of a sacred issue and which was much discussed in the comments. I typically think of hot-button issues such as abortion (or gay marriage, or now health-care reform) through the framework of accessibility. Public discussions over, say, fiscal policy don't become attenuated because most people don't know much about the issue, or don't care. They are therefore more willing to defer to the opinion of the presumed experts on the subject. In contrast, everyone has some personal expertise on sex and love and health, so they are more willing to venture and defend a strong opinion on this subject. So in many cases our sacred values are also our quotidian concerns.

YESTERDAY Kathleen Sebelius charged into a meeting with AHIP, the health-insurance industry group, and castigated them, for the second time in as many weeks, for hiking rates and raising profit margins while dropping more and more people from their rolls. She then invited them to be a part of the solution, rather than a part of the problem, by backing health-care reform. AHIP honcho Karen Ignagni responded that the industry acknowledges the difficulties, but that from their perspective the problem continues to be rising medical costs that leave them with few options. And that got me thinking about a conversation I had two months ago with my father.

My father is a physician, and for the last decade or so he's been a member of Physicians for a National Health Program. PNHP backs a single-payer national health-insurance system: insurance is taken over by a single government entity, like Medicare, while care (doctors, hospitals, drug and equipment manufacturers, etc) remains private. Like PNHP, my father thinks the Democratic proposal for health-insurance reform is a huge mess. And one reason he thinks so is that he believes that the American private insurance industry's profits and administrative costs suck up so many of our health-care dollars that if you switched to single-payer, you could easily insure every uninsured American with the money you'd save, and still have a pile left over to cut premiums. That's the argument PNHP makes: insurance profits and administration consume 31% of our health-care spending.

I am more optimistic about the Democratic proposal. That's partly because I've been insured in the Netherlands, where an all-private universal health-insurance system works very well (and costs about 40% less than American insurance). But more importantly, I had read Ezra Klein's explanation of how the health-insurance industry's profits and administrative costs are really not that big a piece of America's overspending on health care. In fact they total just $145 billion, about 7% of health-care spending. Mr Klein isn't the only one making that argument; in fact, it has settled into something of a consensus among progressive health-care bloggers in the wonkosphere that the health-insurance industry's incentives may be perverse, but it isn't a source of much of America's astronomical spending. Matthew Yglesias refers to this graph from a McKinsey Global Institute report:

(You get the same numbers on health insurance from the Congressional Research Service.) You can see here that the really big chunk of spending that's above the "expected" value (based on America's per capita GDP, compared to other OECD countries' health spending) is in outpatient care. The real reason America spends too much is that health care costs too much. Our procedures are too expensive, and we perform too many of them. Hence, cutting our health-care spending is going to involve something doctors (even my father!) don't much like to talk about: lower income for a whole lot of doctors.

Continue reading "Diagnosing the problem" >>

MY COLLEAGUE Lexington notes that people have been arguing over the role of Western evangelicals in promoting homophobia in Africa, notably in Uganda's proposed law that prescribes the death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality". Lexington cites Philip Jenkins, the expert on global Christianity, as arguing that the claim that African homophobia is imported from Western evangelicals is "bunk".

Gay-bashing in Uganda was common long before any American preachers showed up and gave unpleasant speeches. Rivalry between Islam and Christianity for adherents ensures that preachers of both faiths compete to offer the most anti-gay vision, because that is what a lot of Ugandans want. As in many parts of Africa, openly gay people risk being lynched. The idea that Africans are passive puppets waiting to be told what to do by Americans is both wrong and insulting, says Mr Jenkins. 

Lexington attended a talk Mr Jenkins gave in Miami on Tuesday, and spoke with him before and afterwards. It sounds as though Mr Jenkins's focus has evolved a bit over the past few years; when he wrote this article in the New Republic, he wasn't exactly saying that Western evangelicals were irrelevant to Ugandan homophobia. It was more that such influence had been over-emphasised. He situated African homophobia in the rising tide of evangelical Christianity in Africa, and noted that first- and second-generation converts to any faith tend to be more literal in their interpretations of its holy texts. He did argue that competition between Christianity and Islam helps drive homophobia, but he did so in a way that highlights how values are shaped dynamically by the discourse generated in religious competition, including missionary discourse. He also placed African antipathy to homosexuality in historical context, recalling a fascinating angle to the history of Uganda's 19th-century Catholic martyrs. (Apparently some of them were Christian pages who refused to take part in the pederasty adopted by the Arab-influenced Muslim king of Buganda.) "For many Africans," Mr Jenkins wrote, "sexual unorthodoxy has implications that are at once un-Christian, anti-national, and oppressive."

Continue reading "Anti-imperialism as a hand-washing strategy" >>

LET'S take a break to think about John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. I don't need convincing, but for those of you who do, David Denby has a critical assessment of Mr Eastwood's career in the current New Yorker. Mr Wayne and Mr Eastwood are the two great faces of Western movies, and it's impossible to reflect on their oeuvres without sensing a subtle shift in the underlying culture. This is the end of "The Searchers", from John Ford and John Wayne in 1956:

Mr Denby quotes Roland Barthes, who said, "Mass culture is a machine for showing desire". He adds

As [Wayne's biographer] pointed out, Wayne, swinging his bulk down the streets of the Old West, couldn't imagine being challenged by anyone. Eastwood, ever wary, couldn't imagine a world free of challenge. Wayne's confidence, [the biographer said], made him especially popular in a country that had won the Second World War and shouldered the burdens of the Cold War. One could add that Eastwood's guardedness, and his Magnum, offered reassurance to a country that was losing in Vietnam and feared chaos in the streets.

As my colleague notes below, on Sunday, the academy award for best picture went to "The Hurt Locker", an astonishingly crafted Iraq-war drama that edged the multi-billion-dollar half-animated eco-epic "Avatar". (Voting rules aside, I think "The Hurt Locker" was way better than the nonetheless enjoyable "Avatar".) These were the two major movies of the year for America, and interestingly, neither hinged on any major-name actors. Although as our correspondent in Los Angeles noted presciently in 2008, the main character in "The Hurt Locker" is still in line with the older tradition in American movies:

Staff Sergeant William James, played by Jeremy Renner, is a wild man addicted to the adrenalin rush of doing the most dangerous job in the world. He is a character who can embody the central myth of American cinema because his job is saving lives, not taking them.

...By making a film about an unpopular war that still gives the audience someone to root for, [the director Kathryn Bigelow] may have struck gold. Perhaps the return of John Wayne is what people have been waiting for.

A good call, although the Hurt Locker guy is more of an Eastwood character than a John Wayne type. He has lots of socially maladaptive traits and although he is the centre of the film, he maintains a curious anonymity (even though the name William James is famous for other reasons, it would be easy to come out of the movie having no idea what the character or for that matter the actor is called.)

On a similar note, has America moved past its iconic actors? In the 1990s we would have pointed to Tom Hanks as the quintessential American actor, with "Forrest Gump" as his biggest cultural moment. For that matter, Mr Hanks is on the current cover of Time, which calls him America's "chronicler-in-chief".  Perhaps a tip to Jim Carrey as the foil. In the decade that just passed it didn't come together for any one actor that way. George Clooney had the best track record, but his taste is perhaps too ironic to draw him to one of those major zeitgeist-y productions. (And speaking of Mr Carrey, if you want to think about his work in an entirely new and totally convincing way, this excellent article is your chance.)

YOU and I may believe that Israel has spent the past three decades gradually carving out more and more Palestinian land on the West Bank, building more and more settlements, and pushing the Palestinians back further and further into a shrunken version of their initial vision of statehood. But it's useful to realise that many Israelis have convinced themselves that they are the ones who are constantly giving in, while the Palestinians remain adamant and unreasonable. Consider this article by Herb Keinon in the right-wing Jerusalem Post, "Shifting Palestinian red lines":

Wasn’t it Ariel Sharon who said in 2001 that Gush Katif needed to be maintained as a security zone, only to uproot those same settlements in 2005? Didn’t Ehud Olmert, as Jerusalem mayor, call on the government in 1996 to firmly state that it was not prepared to relinquish Jerusalem under any circumstances, only to offer Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in 2008 half the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem, as well as an Israeli pledge to relinquishing sovereignty over the city’s “holy basin?” And wasn’t it Binyamin Netanyahu who, at a Likud Central Committee meeting in 2002, said, “Dear friends, let me say this once again loud and clear: There will not be a Palestinian state west of the Jordan” – only to have embraced the “two-state vision” in 2009?

There is a pattern here. Israelis say things, but don’t mean them. The Palestinians, on the other hand, have set a track record of saying what they mean.

Another way to phrase this would be that Ariel Sharon, in 2001, tried to pursue a strategically absurd policy of maintaining illegal settlements of a few thousand Israelis surrounded by millions of Palestinians in Gaza, but eventually gave in to reason. Ehud Olmert once supported Israel's unilateral attempt to annex all of East Jerusalem, an annexation no other country in the world has recognised, but proved willing to compromise in exchange for a peace deal. And Binyamin Netanyahu, when he was in the opposition, tried to renege on Israel's binding commitment in the Oslo Accords to allow a Palestinian state, but fortunately decided to honour Israel's promises when he was elected prime minister. Yet another point to make is that when Israelis try to justify to Americans their illegal settlements in the West Bank, or various other aggressive policies, they say such claims are merely bargaining chips to be given away in exchange for a peace deal. Then, when the bargaining chips are cashed in, Israeli right-wingers like Mr Keinon can wail about Israel's lack of resolve and bemoan all the compromises they've had to make.

Yesterday Joe Biden arrived in Israel to pave the way for indirect talks between the Israelis and Palestinians. The talks will involve George Mitchell shuttling between the delegations. The Palestinians had agreed to indirect talks under American pressure despite having earlier said there would be no talks until Israel completely froze construction in its illegal settlements on the West Bank, as Barack Obama demanded this spring. Israel has instead conceded a temporary moratorium on construction of some settlements. But, as Ha'aretz reports, "The Palestinians issued a strongly worded protest Monday after Ehud Barak, Israel's defence minister, gave permission for the construction of 112 housing units in the settlement of Beitar Ilit, despite the construction freeze in the West Bank settlements." And Mr Biden followed that up with his own laudable, strongly worded condemnation:

I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem. The substance and timing of the announcement, particularly with the launching of proximity talks, is precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now and runs counter to the constructive discussions that I’ve had here in Israel. We must build an atmosphere to support negotiations, not complicate them.

The most sympathetic interpretation I can construct of why Israel tends to pull these kinds of stunts is that they feel it to be universally accepted normal bargaining behaviour to stake out a maximalist position before entering into a negotiation. As former American negotiator Dennis Ross once said during an earlier round of negotiations (referring to the Palestinian side), "The souk never closes with you people, does it?" But Israelis still, after all these years, don't seem to recognise that what they may think of as staking out a bargaining position is seen by the other side as evidence that negotiations are futile, because they plan to steal everything in the shop.

(Photo credit: AFP)