The Boston Globe this morning dedicates a front page article by reporter Anne Barnard to advocate for more Israeli concessions toward the construction of a Palestinian Arab state. It's really quite astounding. It's not that one should be surprised that the Globe would dedicate a front page "news" article to shill for an agenda -- that's sadly to be expected. No, what's more astounding is the general political effort to construct not just a "Palestinian State," but a really, really good one. How many other nations in the world are there toughing it out on what they have without the rest of the world demanding that neighboring states cut them a break by conceding territory just to make them more even? You make due with what you get.

The majority of Palestinian Arabs support groups with overtly genocidal goals. Not just Hamas and the like, but even the PA itself glorifies suicide, maps itself over all of the State of Israel and supports the return of millions of Arabs to inside the borders of the Jewish State. As payment to these wonderful neighbors, Israel, of all people, is expected to make massive concessions of land, uproot thousands of its citizens and continue to jeopardize its people's safety and prosperity.

According to the article, the Arabs need the Jerusalem area as an industrial base around which to seed an economy. Well who developed the area to make it industrially desirable? Here's a hint: It wasn't the Palestinians. Israel itself was built on undesirable land. It was built on desert and drained swamps and whatever the Jews could purchase from gouging Ottoman land-owners. They accepted a rump partitioned state on lands less contiguous and ripe for development than what the Arabs already have. In return, despite war, terror and attempted genocide, they have built something through sweat equity and enterprise -- something this Calvanist New Englander can appreciate and admire. They merit what they have, and what they have is something that an unappreciative world and jealous neighbors think they deserve a piece of though it was built in spite of them.

If what's there in the West Bank and Gaza isn't good enough (barring, of course, logical border adjustments), let the Arabs turn to their neighbors in Jordan and Egypt for assistance and land concessions. To expect Israel to make massive contributions to a people who've done nothing but try to destroy them is perverse. To expect Israel to give Jerusalem to a people who've done nothing but their best to erase the Jewish presence there (physically in 1948 and the historical record ever since) is bizarre. Let the people who's most ubiquitous indigenous manufactured product is martyrdom posters and who's main export is the mainstreaming of suicide murder prove they merit gifts before they receive them.

Tell me, appeasers, paleo-cons, leftists, Globe staff, once you've sold out Israel and your own principles (against genocide, civil rights, rights for gays and women, a free press...), do you think it will have bought you anything? Or will you just encourage the forging of new demands?

This entry may seem a bit of a rant, and that it is. I guess I'm a reactionary at heart. I read garbage like this Globe article and feel the need to shake the sense into someone as a corrective. It may be born of reaction, but I think it's closer to the truth and a conveyance of reality than you're likely ever to read in the pages of the Boston Globe.

Will Israel need to make more concessions, including territorial concessions? It's likely. But the idea that those concessions will be massive, and that they will be all Israel's, and that that's default, assumed and expected starting position is unrealistic, morally obtuse and frankly a little sick.

Here's the dreck:

West Bank conflict brews after Gaza - Statehood, security spur competing claims on area

One more thing. I just can't let this conclusion pass unfisked:

Except for the hundreds, perhaps thousand of lives the wall has already saved. It was good for those people.

Edit: This article is so regressive it even contains the reembodyment of Sykes-Picot. You know, the two European diplomats who sat down during WWI and carved out the borders of the modern Middle East? Funny, I was under the impression a lot of people looked on that idea rather negatively in retrospect, but this latter-day Sykes-Picot comes in the form of a cartographer and Palestinian adviser (maybe that's the difference) named Jan de Jong, who's given unanswered column space to instruct us on what parts Israel needs to lop off of itself to finally satisfy the people that haven't shown any other interest aside from wanting to destroy it.