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as if to balance Hamas’s blame for every single death in the conflict, Goldblog feels the need to chide the Israeli prime minister for his “mistake” in having utter contempt for any two-state solution. “Mistake” is an interesting word to use. It implies a relatively minor slip-up, a miscalculation, a foolish divergence from sanity. But it is perfectly clear to anyone not always finding excuses for the Israeli government that Netanyahu wasn’t making a mistake. He was simply reiterating his longstanding view that Israel will never, ever allow a sovereign Palestinian state to co-exist as a neighbor. And unless you understand that, nothing he has done since taking office makes any sense at all. Everything he has said and done presupposes permanent Greater Israel. And he is not some outlier. Israel’s entire political center of gravity is now firmly where Netanyahu is. The rank failure of the peace process simply underlines this fact. As do half a million Jewish settlers and religious fanatics on the West Bank.

Since the whole idea of a two-state solution is as dead as the infamous parrot, why on earth are Americans still pursuing it? I think because many want Israel to be other than what it plainly is. They understand that this project of a bi-national state with Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement is a horrible fate. Jeffrey is as eloquent on this today as he has ever been: If Netanyahu has convinced himself that a Palestinian state is an impossibility, then he has no choice but to accept the idea that the status quo eventually brings him to binationalism, either in its Jim Crow form—Palestinians absorbed into Israel, except without full voting rights—or its end-of-Israel-as-a-Jewish-state form, in which the two warring populations, Jewish and Arab, are combined into a single political entity, with chaos to predictably ensue. But this is clearly the reality. The Obama administration was the last hope for some kind of agreement, and the Israelis have told the president to go fuck himself on so many occasions the very thought of accommodation is preposterous. With the acceleration of the settlements, and the ever-rising racism and religious fundamentalism in Israel itself, this is what Israel now is.

This is what really put Israel’s occupation and settlement of the West Bank in perspective for me: Israel has possessed the West Bank for almost precisely the same proportion of its national existence as the United States has possessed Texas and California. About seven-tenths

the United States would first have to become an existentially different nation before it would even consider peaceably permitting California and Texas to leave the union. Just so with Israel

Despite protestations otherwise, possession of the West Bank has become a fundamental and existential part of the character of Israeli nationhood. Possession of the West Bank is not temporary, it is not contingent, and it is not an exception to the general rule of the character of Israeli nationhood. Occupation and settlement are as central to the Israeli nation, its politics and culture, as burritos, Hollywood, and Sunbelt conservatism are to American politics, culture, and national identity.

It also helps distract from the fact that Hamas itself did not kill the three Israeli teens which was the casus belli for the latest Israeli swoop through the West Bank; that Netanyahu had called for generalized revenge in the wake of the killings, while concealing the fact that the teens had been murdered almost as soon as they had been captured; and that Israeli public hysteria, tapping into the Gilad-like trauma of captivity, then began to spawn increasingly ugly, sectarian and racist acts of revenge and brutality.

Whatever that treaty’s deficiencies, few inside the U.S.—and nobody outside it—deny that Iran complied with its terms. Iran’s behavior in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, and Gaza is vicious and destructive, as it has been for decades. But where’s the casus belli here? What declared-in-advance U.S. red lines has Iran tripped? Any U.S. military action will look to the world like a bolt-from-the-blue act of aggression. It will look that way for the excellent reason that it’s precisely what it would be.

If you will not do it, you should not talk about it. If you are thinking about doing it, stop. And if you are talking without thinking? The U.S. and the world have had more than enough of that from Washington, and not only since January 2017.

Tillerson may very well stay on, as others have until Trump has decided that it’s more fun to kick them out than simply to kick them. If he does remain, it will be yet another sign of the collapse of self respect among those who are now willing to serve in senior positions in government.

An administration is not just a president, but a vast team, led by a score or so of senior officers of the government. What the Tillerson test may reveal is what a pathetic group most of them are. And the surrender or war over Korea that may follow will be but one part, however distressing or bloody, of the price this country will pay for a government administered by moral weaklings and lickspittles.

In Ukraine no such Security Council resolution has been adopted—but only because Russia, a permanent member, vetoed it. The UN General Assembly overwhelmingly condemned the invasion

when the UN Security Council condemns an act of aggression, that resolution is legally binding on all member states.

As for states becoming co-belligerents, the bar is even higher, argues Michael Schmitt of the United States Military Academy at West Point. German supplies of arms to Ukraine do not make Germany a party to the conflict with Russia because “there are no hostilities between the States concerned”—their soldiers are not killing each other.

“If Russia wants to feel provoked and attack NATO it will do it, independently of whether we have delivered tanks,”

thers think that if supplying heavy weapons increases the risk of a direct conflict, it is mainly because they make more inviting targets

it is wrong to dismiss the legal aspects of co-belligerency entirely: they help prevent a conflict escalating to nuclear war. When America and other NATO countries rule out putting boots on the ground in Ukraine, they emphasise such a step would make them parties to the conflict. This, Mr Haque thinks, is a useful way to draw red lines between nuclear powers. “America is using these rules of international law to signal to Russia that we will come up to a clear red line but not cross it. I think Russia understands that signalling,”

“But they will try to contest the American interpretation of those rules and invent their own red lines—not based on law—to serve their aims.”

America never accused the Soviets or Chinese of being co-belligerents, and the nuclear powers never came close to direct conflict. American bombers avoided Soviet freighters: when US Air Force pilots accidentally strafed one in 1967, they were court-martialled. America was restrained not by international law but by the fact that bringing the Soviets or Chinese into the war would not have been in its interests.

That will be the decisive factor for Russia in Ukraine, too. “If Russia wanted the conflict to spill over and drag us in, it would have already succeeded in doing that,”