I live in close proximity to Palestinians and even those who help build construction in settlements east of the Green line are confident that they are winning.

I’m sorry but I have no confidence that you have yr pulse on the true heartbeat of Palestinian society. Look through this site for the many Israeli & Palestinian political opininon surveys I’ve provided. All Palestinian survey uniformly find that the majority wants peace along the lines I’ve outlined here & is willing to renounce violence & recognize Israel to get it. Hamas may not fully share those views but even in the last election Hamas did not get a majority of the vote and now it would receive much less because Palestinians do not share Hamas’ rigidity regarding the conflict.

the majority of Palestinians that I have met would at least agree with him.

The operative phrase is “that I have met.” I can’t account for how many or which Palestinians you have met. But surveys don’t lie. And they cover a lot more territory than a single individual like yourself can.

spend a few days in East Jerusalem, Hebron, Ramallah

I have good Jewish friends who’ve done precisely that & reported to me their findings which jibe w. my own. BTW, how many days have YOU spent among Palestinians in any of those places?

As for Benvenisti, pls. go back through any of his columns in Haaretz & show me anything that supports yr view that he wishes the demise of Israel. I don’t have to prove Benvenisti supports Israel because I don’t have any doubt of the truth of this statement. For God’s sake, he was Jerusalem’s long-serving deputy mayor under Teddy Kollek. How could you accuse such an individual of harboring such views, esp. w/o providing any real proof that he does? If you believe this of him, then I’m afraid it’s yr responsibility to prove otherwise.

Asking me to prove that Benvenisti supports Israel’s right to exist is a lot like Joe McCarthy asking people to prove they aren’t Communists. I don’t want to play that game.

If you read Benveniste’s other articles in Haaretz, you will find explicit support of a binational state.

I read him there pretty religiously & haven’t read such sentiments. If you find anything more specific feel free to bring it to my attention.

he opposed Jews trying to reclaim properties in the Old City, prefering to keep the ethnically cleansed status of the Old City.

In this blog, I don’t go in much for propaganda slogans full of rhetoric & empty of meaning. “Ethnic cleansing” in the context of the I-P conflict is definitely one of those phrases I detest. Instead of using that term, I could just as easily (& much more truthfully) describe Jewish rightist efforts to reclaim the Jewish Quarter as a land grab at the expense of Palestinians who’d lived there for generations. The question is do you want to right some wrong done 60 years ago when Jews were displaced fr. the Quarter by the Jordanians; or do you want to create a solution that will ensure peace for our children & generations to come? Wisely, Benvenisti foresaw that such expropriations in the Jewish Quarter would create hatred & conflict bet. the 2 communities. And guess what, it did precisely that.

He seems to agree with Israeli artist Igal Tumarkin, who is famous for his pictures of pigs wearing tefillin

“He seems to agree?” Do you think you can pass this off as legitimate argument in this blog? That’s rich. If you want to cast calumnies like that around you’ll have to be a lot more definitive than “he seems.” You have no evidence that he believes this because he doesn’t.

Benveniste is routinely quoted on neo-Nazi websites

Again, a completely illegitimate argument. Even the devil quotes Scripture. I’ve been linked & quoted in Holocaust Revisionist websites (in addition to being linked, quoted & reviled in countless rightist pro-Israel sites). You can’t judge the truth, credibility or quality of anyone’s thought based on who quotes them. That’s simply ridiculous.

[He] may have served as inspiration for Arab claims, including Amin’s, that there is no Jewish claim to the land of Israel.

“May have?” What does “may have” mean? Either he served as inspiration or he didn’t. If you believe he did, then show it. If you can’t, then you have no case. And Benvenisti does NOT believe that there is no Jewish claim to the land. What he does believe is that are equally valid & worthy claims put forward by both sides. This is what really gets yr goat. For a Jew & Israeli to accept that the Palestinians have an equal claim to the land. That sticks in yr craw. Well let it. Get used to it. Whether you like it or not, the final resolution of this conflict will involve 2 peoples living together side by side (though not necessarily in a single state). Neither will have a superior claim to anything. And that’s as it should be.

I think it is important to listen to the repulsive claims of Amin, because in my experience, he represents the majority of Palestinian opinion

While I agree w. the first part of yr assertion, you are dead wrong about the 2nd part. I have covered here many surveys produced by diverse sources, including one conducted jointly by Palestinian pollsters & Hebrew University researchers, of Palestinian political opinion in this blog. Such opinion is uniformly moderate on the major political issues. Palestinians are in favor of negotiation with Israel. They are willing to accept a solution involving ending hostilities & terror attacks & recognizing Israel in return for Israeli withdrawal to 1967 borders. They are willing to accept the 2002 Saudi initiative. Amin in no way represents the majority of those who live in the Territories.

they believe they are on a roll

Do you have a heart, a brain & eyes in yr head? “On a roll?” How can they believe they’re on a roll when hundreds are killed, their babies die of malnutrition, their sick cannot get medicines or hospital treatment, they have no salaries? These people are not stupid nor are they the raving ideologues you make them out to be. They know they are in Israel’s death grip. They know that compromise is the only way out of this. But as long as Olmert refuses to engage in negotiations what are they supposed to do? Just lay themselves in their coffins & prepare for death? No, they’re not going to make it that easy. I read both the Israeli & Palestinian press plus blogs on both sides & I’ve never read a Palestinian resident in the Territories who believes they are “on a roll.”

Amin does not live in the Territories I am sure. As I wrote above, he has the luxury of sitting in his easy chair & directing the coming Palestinian “victory” while others will actually shed the blood on his behalf. But till you live there or really put yourself in their shoes, you just don’t know what it’s like.

But I totally disagree with you that Benvenisti is an “opponent of Israel.” And I’m afraid we’ll have to “dismantle” Amin’s notion that Benvenisti wishes to “dismantle Israel.” He is an ardent opponent of Israeli policy, but that is far different than saying you want to see Israel destroyed or subsumed within an Arab majority single state. And he certainly does not share the Chomsky-Finkelstein ‘utopian’ one-state vision in which both peoples live together supposedly in peace & tranquility.

I think something more subtle is going on in Benvenisti’s article. I would argue that Benvenisti does prefer the two-state solution. However, he realizes that given the self-destructiveness of Israeli policy, that it is Israel that is rapidly destroying the possibility for a real 2 state solution. He would argue that Israel is headed not for a Chomskyan one-state solution; but rather for a South African apartheid solution in which two peoples live in the same land, but in utterly dominant-dominated mode. Benvenisti argues that Israel is headed down the road of becoming a racist, subjugating state. This too is a one-state solution (he calls it a ‘bi-national state’), but far diff. than what the anti-Zionist utopians posit. And this is certainly not a situation that he anticipates with relish.

The Injustice of the New Formula-by Meron Benvenisti

In recent weeks, the discussion of the chances of the struggle for the establishment of a Palestinian state as a way to resolve the conflict has become sharper and more profound, and alternatives to the formula “two states for two peoples” have been raised; despair over implementing this solution is reinforcing the idea of “one binational state.”

As long as there were only “a few more or less naïve Israelis, who were caught up in the foolish idea of a binational state” (Avraham Tal, Haaretz, October 14), the issue could be treated with condescending dismissiveness.

But when the matter is starting to be discussed by groups and people who belong to the heart of the political and military establishment in both the Israeli and the Palestinian camps, and the attention being devoted to it by pundits and journalists the world over is reaching new heights, the sense heightens that a process of a paradigm change has begun, and that it won’t be long before a contest erupts as to who owns the patent for the new formula.

After all, the slogan “two states” is less than 20 years old, and many of those who are rejecting the binational formula scornfully and aggressively had the same hostile attitude toward the two-state formula, until it gained legitimacy - after being emptied of meaning.

The formula of two states for two peoples is being attacked from different angles and for contradictory reasons. It is also characterized from the outset by willful obstruction, whose implementation leads to the inevitable conclusions.

The Israelis who did their utmost to destroy any chance of the two-state solution are now looking for a way out of the disaster they have brought upon themselves with their own hands.

First of all, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon gets Israel involved in a bitter debate about “the disengagement,” which threatens a national rift, just to bring about a situation in which “this entire package that is called the Palestinian state will disappear from our agenda for an unlimited period of time.”

And afterward, when it turns out that Israel has in fact succeeded in teaching the world that there is “no one to talk to” (on the Palestinian side), the top military echelons leak to Aluf Benn (Haaretz, October 19) that it may be worthwhile to examine the possibility of returning to the pre-1967 situation and to hand over the occupied territories to Syria, Jordan and Egypt - and thus to abandon “the failed attempt to share the country with Arafat and his cronies.”

The very idea that the Arab countries would agree to function as Israel’s storm troopers for the occupation is a mad notion, bordering on chutzpah. But anyone who bases the occupation regime (and the disengagement plan) on the generosity of the donor countries and the UN agencies – and is not ashamed to humiliate them and to insult their emissaries - will not hesitate to blame the “Arabs” for the situation that has been created, and to proclaim his own innocence.

It is the very processes of unilateral disengagement – the separation fence and the evacuation of the Gaza Strip, that ostensibly are implementing the territorial division of Eretz Israel and distancing the nightmare of a binational state, which in fact are laying the foundations for the binational reality and destroying the option of two states for two peoples.

The Israelis believe that the fence turns the conflict into a border dispute, and that disengagement from Gaza alleviates the “demographic problem.”

However, in effect, the fence and the evacuation create total dependence by defenseless Palestinian cantons. Thus a de facto binational state is being established, which contains many deceptive indicators that enable us to nurture the illusion that it is not such a state, and even to make us feel that the worst of all evils - a binational state has been prevented. The Palestinians, who correctly under- stand the significance of the processes - and who are unable to enjoy the luxury of fooling themselves – sense that Israeli activity has in fact made the two-state option impossible, and therefore there must be a return to a one state strategy.

It must be mentioned repeatedly that a binational regime is not a prescription, but a description of the existing situation. The trouble is that the binational danger is being treated only as a possible future problem. The danger of a binational state is illustrated by its opponents not by exposing the racist and discriminatory components that are becoming rooted in everyday existence - and that are clear to everyone, except for the Israelis themselves – but by raising the empty threat called a demographic danger.

The Israelis consider “womb-to-womb combat” more dangerous than their slide down the slope of racism and delegitimization.

Just as a “Palestinian state” is the vessel into which the Israelis throw all the injustices of the past, so a “binational state” is a refuge for all those who fear the future, an empty threat whose purpose is to present undefined dilemmas and theoretical constitutional constructs. In the conditions prevailing today, what difference does it make whether a person supports two states or one?

This preoccupation is only an escape from genuine and immediate problems that stem from the injustices of oppression, from the damage to basic human rights and from racism. How easy it is to fall into the trap of slogans.

Making the world a better place?

How does killing innocent women and children achieve this objective? And can martydom/suicide attacks ever herald even the smallest advance in that direction? Does being validated by historical or divine authority justify the taking or imperilling of even one single human life? No, these are but the tragic by-products of an inability to resolve the situation. They serve only to exacerbate the symptoms, symptoms of a disease as old as Man himself. The territorial imperative is just as dominant in us as when the first cavemen disputed the first waterhole, when the first tribes fought over possession of the best arable land. Justice and legitimacy then, as now, were concepts rarely in attendance. But backtracking over the rights and wrongs in the Palestinian/Israeli dispute serves merely to catalogue the repeated failures of rational human beings caught between diametrically opposed positions. Best leave all that for another time. If justice and legitimacy are to have any dominion over the contested lands of Israel/Palestine then that justice and legitimacy must be massively enhanced, brought up-to-date and to a point where peace becomes the exclusive consideration of all concerned. A cessation in the violence - or at least a significant moratorium on its use - must be the primary requirement. Without this, all the rest is an object lesson in futility.

To that end, all it may require of us ‘rational human beings to contemplate a peace process focused solely on that one single purpose.

As an example, you might care to return to my first comment above.