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The wall again, is it?

I think we left this with me standing firm on the 1967 border and you allowing for small scale Israeli enlargement.

I'll note that I wouldn't have been so charitable as to describe anything Arafat did as dancing - he was a schmuck and good riddance to him, but neither his existence nor Palestinian's dismal inability to find worthy leadership is reason for Israel to play the Lord of the Manor and enclose the Palestinian commons or divest Palestinians of their homes to make room for Israeli homes - were the shoe on the other foot, Palestinian settlements or encroachment in Israel would be no more acceptable than the current setup, and we need to start enforcing that policy with a little more firmness than we have in the past.

As to where this leads, I'll quote Scheuer himself:

Israel. There is certainly not a more difficult or dangerous issue to debate in the field of postwar U.S. foreign policy. The American political landscape is littered with the battered individuals - most recently the president of the United States - who dared to criticize Israel, or, even more heretically, to question the value to U.S. national interests of the country's overwhelmingly one-way alliance with Israel. Almost every such speaker is immediately branded anti-Semitic and consigned to the netherworld of American politics, as if concerns about U.S. national security are prima facie void if they involve any questioning the U.S.-Israeli status quo.

What I am saying is that the settlements near the border put pressure on the Palestinians to change their position. The far flung ones were unfortunate, and will be abandoned anyway, but in the end, I don't think that had much to do with Palestinian irrationality, or being a barrior to peace in the sense of deflecting Palestinians away from something that it was moral for the US to push Israel to accept.

In the end, what is the in US interests in the long term is to do what is moral and consistent with its conscience - not to pacify the Arabs in an agenda that does not comport with that.

If one really wants to criticize the US and Israel, it should pertain to the period after the 1967 war and into the 1970's, and that is water long under the bridge.

By the way it is hard for any fair minded person to criticize Israel after Barak extended the deal he did, and its rejection. That exposed that the Palestinians and their leadership wore no clothes, covering up their ethnic cleansing agenda, in my mind. That was the real Rubicon for me, as to my present views.

If the show were on the other foot, there would be no Israel.
On the other hand, there already is an Arab state on 3/4 of 1922 Palestine.
The issue then is how much of the disputed territory, Israel should take. Most of the "settlements" are either on previously empty land, or land owned by Jews prior to 1947-49.

The costs of supporting Israel are known. What are the costs of not supporting Israel?
Are we to believe that the Muslim world will cease to have grievences? I doubt it. They will have an excuse for Jihad as long as any non-Muslim nation controls territory once controlled by Muslims or any Muslim in Dar Al-Harb is slighted. Of course, the ultimate goal of Muslims is a world-wide Caliphate.

Scheuer knows this. His blaming Israel is therefor a clear attempt to buy off Islam. Of course, the question is why Israel and not Russia, Spain, of Greece?
Instead of dealing with Islam, he preffers to whine about Jewish power.