Ehud Barak, during the days he was building his political career, caused something of a stir when asked what he would have done had he been born a Palestinian. He replied, "If I were born a Palestinian, I would have joined a terror group." He later qualified this by expressing that he expected that he would matured into a political leader who would have laid down his arms and negotiated for peace, but I think his original answer was more honest. That is, you don't seem to be alone.

Yes, Aaron, I remember that remark and thought it fairly honest (though I am really not at all keen on Mr. Barak).

A certain segment of the political spectrum seems to have terrible trouble imagining how awful it must be for Palestinians. It is, often, the same segment that seems very eager to throw off all sorts of other moral restraints under far less provocation.

What I said about the collapse of Oslo was more or less what Clinton's cheif negotiator has said about it. The rejectionist was Barak, who failed to recognise (or didn't care) that what Arafat was offering on behalf of the Palestinians was historically unique, an absolute rock-bottom modest demand. Those 'few strips of land' offered by Barak are precisely that, and the maps are now available online to check.

Still, leaving that aside, I want to be clear (just in case there is any misunderstanding) that my post wasn't about providing justification for suicide bombings. I believe, like you, that these are a total moral failure, partially as a consequence of their being a strategic failure.

I don't agree that a strictly non-violent movement would have gotten very far, or that it will get very far now. Palestinians do not have the economic centrality that, say, South Africa's black population did. One consequence of Zionist ideology has been the total marginalisation of Palestinians in the Israeli economy (this began even before Israel came into existence properly). So, whereas the latter may have been able to organise collectively and declare strikes, the former have little ability to do this. It is doubtful, therefore, that we would even be talking about the Palestinians had it not been for the violent resistance mounted by Fatah and other organisations. If you ask me, we would still be with Golda Meir, assuring the world that the Palestinians never existed.

When I talked about the collapse of Oslo, I meant the whole bloody collapse, the long, slow, torturous dance of killing and retaliation that began soon after the assasination of Rabin. And when I said that I might assign blame differently, I meant that you just can't ignore rejectionist elements on both sides when you try to understand the reasons for the collapse. Hamas wanted more. They simply were not satisfied with the deal, and they were important players in the game. To talk about what the Palestinians were willing to accept at any point, when in fact Palestinian society was as fragmented as Israeli society, distorts matters. And so Hamas set about to give the Israeli right increased influence within Israel by massacring innocent Israelis. And it worked. And the Israeli right, thus empowered, did absolutely everything it could to undermine trust and consensus among Palestinians. And I think we can tell the same sad story from the beginning to the end of Oslo.

Suppose, as I'm sometimes inclined to believe, that Palestinian intrasigence at Taba has been vastly exaggerated, and that they could have had a deal if Barak had really wanted one. Even if they had made a deal, they would have had to figure out how to deal with their own rejectionists, and it wouldn't have been easy. That's part of the story too - it's not simply a story of big bad Israelis kicking the crap out of eminently sensible Palestinians.

Anyway, as long as we're agreeing on the point that terrible traumas and pressures can lead people to do things which we think are wrong, but to a certain extent understandable, why don't we extend to the point to include the Jews who fought in 1948? There often seems precious little recognition that a few thousand years of persecution and flight culminating in an event like the holocaust can be a bit, well, traumatic itself. I don't condone the ethnic cleansing of 1948 or the racist and brutal stuff that came after. But I can try to imagine what the world must have looked like to the remnant of Jews fleeing Europe after WWII who looked to have, finally, a place of their own after suffering almost beyond comparison.

Not an important point perhaps, but I remember seeing an interview with Sharon a good few years ago in which he said that he felt he understood Arafat because he (Sharon) had been a terrorist himself. There was no sense that he was apologising for his terrorist past, and the interview left me feeling that he continued to see terrorism as a horrible but legitimate tactic in extreme circumstances, and therefore felt he could talk to the Palestinians in a mutually comprehensible language. I've scoured the web looking for this article, but I can't find it, so I won't base any conclusions on my recollection.