...Almost as if he foresaw the stalemate that now has us in its grips, Alterman writes in his poem that the boy and the girl are dirty, caked with the dirt of the fields and the fire-line. Unlike the Torah, which suggests that preparation for the revelation requires that everyone wash their garments, Alterman suggests that if the Jews insist on being clean, or insist on purity, there's no hope. It's a dirty world we live in, he understands, and in this world, we have to decide how badly we want to stay alive.

But we haven't decided that we want to stay alive. We don't want Ban Ki-Moon to chastise us. We want George Bush to love us. We don't want the BBC or CNN to broadcast pictures of Palestinian children wounded or killed by Jewish soldiers. We don't want more protests like we had this week, with Israeli Arabs rioting in opposition to the minor incursion into Gaza and voicing their support for Hamas. It's all just too complicated and unpleasant we'd much rather pretend that we live in America, that we can ignore the dormant volcano of Israel's Arabs, too.

So we sit. And civilians keep getting targeted, and keep dying. And soldiers die. And Israeli towns become ghost towns. But George Bush most supports us, so we feel better. And the charade with Abu Mazen permits us to continue hallucinating about the possibility of peace, to pretend that the Palestinians aren't simply an utterly failed people that will never make peace in our lifetimes or those of our children, so we feel even better...