Andrew Sullivan is on Osama bin Laden’s warning that we won’t be secure till the Palestinians are. Recalls General Jones’s warning to J Street: this thing is at the center of everything. I’m giving Sullivan a month or two, then he’ll be out on the Israel lobby as a prime motivator. He knows.
Jihadism has many causes… But the idea that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and pulverization of Gaza can be bracketed entirely out of that dynamic is loopy (see how the CIA’s double agent turned again after Gaza). It’s clear that taking the Israel-Palestine question off the table would help us tackle Jihadism immensely… it would help shift the paradigm in which they can use the daily humiliations of Arabs in the West Bank or the horror of the Gaza attack as ways to move the Muslim middle….
Unwinding this cycle is a huge amount of what Obama is trying to do. Which is why those who want a civilizational war are so adamantly opposed to him and his policies.
