Free Republic

The Middle East crisis offers the world an ethical litmus test for our generation in a variety of historic ways. Legitimate arguments can arise about the proper borders between Israel and the proposed independent state of Palestine — no doubt an eventual autonomous realm of somewhere between 92 percent and 97 percent of the present West Bank.Yet if simple land and the idea of a self-governed West Bank nation were the primary points of contention then the dispute would have been settled long ago through reasoned negotiations. Israel, after all, for the first third of its 60-year struggle had...