Jim Henley explains how Yasser Arafat and company permanently and totally lost their battle for the hearts and minds of him, me, and I would bet most Americans in the summer of 1972. Some of my schoolmates were on the airplanes flown to Jordan and blown up in 1970, so Palestinian terrorism seemed very real as we watched the Munich Olympics Massacre on TV...

Unqualified Offerings: ...I was twelve years old at the time of the Munich Olympics and I saw the whole, awful thing, and the experience never left me. Enthusiasts for the Palestinian cause, however defined, might profit from pondering why that is. It was obvious to me, watching the masked gunmen on the balconies, and later the garish, uninformative spotlights on the runway, what I was seeing: a crime. I was watching bad guys. My first sustained exposure to "the plight of the Palestinians" was to villains acting in their name.... Then came the "discourse." Draw attention to the cause! I'd type more catch-phrases, but it's not worth the disgust. The 1970s were the high-water mark of Fanonist mendacity. It dumbfounded me then that anyone could believe such things, that people like George Habash were allowed to sit for interviews and go unmolested by local police anywhere on earth. Even then, Europe accepted such arguments in a way most Americans instinctively rejected them. To me, Yasser Arafat and the PLO were simply the masterminds of a loathsome criminal act. Weightlifters. That'll show 'em.

I think I'm far from the only American that Munich made a lasting impression on, and to the Palestinian's detriment. Later there was Entebbe and Khartoum and Leon Klinghoffer to reinforce the impression, but it was the sheer squalid cruelty of Munich that set the tone. Even after Oslo, the part of me that hoped for peace warred with the part that couldn't accept that Yasser Arafat should be allowed to live comfortably as a free man. It was not just the crimes, it was justifying the crimes.

The Palestinians have always had a case. Whether their case was particularly egregious in a global-historical sense is a matter for debate, but you can't blame the Palestinians themselves for a certain lack of detachment in the matter. You can blame their leaders for indulging in a decades-long orgy of apocalyptic gesture, though. And you can note that in their smug self-justification for turning crime into politics, they lost for decades the sympathy of the one country on earth that could bring them something like surcease and recompense: my country.

Readers of this blog know that I am pretty hard on Israel. I believe that many of its remaining security problems are substantially, though not entirely, of its own making. I believe that, at bottom, a critical mass of its political elite would rather have the West Bank than peace. I believe that the founding of Israel in 1948 represented many, many instances of what the Fifth Amendment refers to as a "taking" and that the individual property-holders affected should be compensated financially. I believe that, so long as Israel maintains a distinction between subjects in the West Bank and Gaza and citizens in Israel proper, that there is an occupation, and it is illegitimate. I believe that if Israel can't survive without continued US aid, that Zionism has failed at its stated purpose of ensuring a refuge for the Jews. These are intellectual positions. Since the proportion of Americans polled who say the US needs to pressure Israel to do more for peace grows ever closer to the proportion who think the US needs to pressure the Palestinian Authority, I'd wager that these are increasingly common beliefs. But at least on my part, they come with no particular emotional attachment to the situation of the Palestinians themselves. This is an ascription of collective responsibility for the crimes of a few, and the apologetics of more than a few. It is my failing.

That failing is thirty years old tonight.