When one writes something about the Mideast situation, one kind of holds one's breath and braces expecting the floodgates to open and to be bombarded with hate mail. But that hasn't happened. Instead I got some thoughtful emails, including this one from Haggai Elitzur, who blogs here:

I have a lot of respect for what Cole writes about Iraq, but I don't think he's terribly reliable on Israel. My most recent blog post points out a surprisingly obvious flaw in an analogy he recently made about the Rantisi killing. He asked, "why couldn't the Israelis arrest Rantisi? They pulled off Entebbe." Uh, except that in the Entebbe hostage rescue, *all of the terrorists were killed*! If Israel had tried to arrest the likes of Yassin and Rantisi (with no hostage rescue in the picture this time), the large cadres of bodyguards that those guys employed would most likely lead to huge firefights. Considering how densely populated Gaza is, that would almost certainly result in more Palestinian deaths than the missile strikes that did happen. There are various arguments to made about those assassinations, but saying that arresting those guys is a better option doesn't strike me as a very serious or well thought-out argument.

Regarding the spillover into Iraq that Cole attributes to the Yassin killing, while it would be very naive to claim that the Israel/Palestinian situation is totally unrelated to Iraq, isn't it almost as dubious to claim that an Israeli assassination is as crucial to the Iraq situation as Cole makes it out to be? Think about it--would the recent disastrous events in Iraq have been completely avoided if Israel *hadn't* killed Yassin? I find that very hard to believe, but it seems to be the logical conclusion of Cole's reasoning on this point. Is it all that controversial for me to claim that what's happening on the ground in Iraq has far more to do with what the US has been doing on the ground there for the past year, than it does with what Israel is doing at this moment on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza?

Haggai

Thanks for the letters, and for the civilized discussion, people.

Posted by Laura at April 21, 2004 07:25 AM