I have heard Juan Cole speak on Chris Lydon's Radio Open Source. Listening to him he was much more impressive than what I've read in his writing. I wish he brought the same balance he displayed on the radio to his prose, which when it comes to anything about Israel strikes me as inflammatory rather than insightful. The one thing that seems accurate in this piece is the last sentence: "Peace requires negotiations and partners." But his take on existing negotiations and potential partners is as self-chosenly blind as Golda Meir's fatally mistaken insistence that "there are no Palestinians." Just as there certainly are Palestinians, there is also a history of miserable and corrupt Palestinian leadership. Cole is unwilling here to look at the complexities of the partners, choosing instead to put everyting on Sharon (and by extension) Israel's shoulders. There are several excellent explorations of the Palestinian leadership, the most recent written by David Samuels in a recent Atlantic article. Just take Barak's offer. Ideal or not, the leftist version of events patronizes the Palestinians in ways that remind me of 60s white liberals assuming that every black revolutionary represented more than philosophic legitimacy but also personal legitimacy. There are oceans between the former and the latter. Take examples of the Camp David negotiations where Barak certainly offered something to the Palestinians. Arafat may have been personally insulted by Barak's style (as are many Israelis who worked with him), and what was offered was not something even I as a pro-Israeli sympathizer think was ultimately workable for the Palestinians. But Arafat could have come up with alternatives. He basically ran, choosing till the end his life as a victim rather than a man that won something substantial for his people. My point is that if Sharon was far from a saint, the world within which he deals is a labyrinth of visciously competing parties. Just look at the article on Lebanon published the same day in Salon. Just as the right wants to demonize the Palestinians by word-play and associations that make them seem totally unreasonable, similarly many left wing and liberal critics of Israel (like certain church groups boycotting companies doing business with Zionists) act as if they live in a world where concepts of ideal justice preclude the nuance of everyday survival in a very complex place. Neither side are doing these partners any good, reinforcing the worst on all sides. Juan Cole is clealy a passionate and energetic scholar. I wish he was a bit more energetic and passionate about the complexities which get in the way of the negotiations and the partners.

Frequently, personal narratives involving physical pain or emotional frustration are whiny and self-pitying. Even more so when they have to do with relationships between women and men. Williams' honesty never lapses into blame or inflated misery. In fact, her tale of life around giving life, as it happens, is funny, believable, and touching.

Jonathan Field

NYC