Status quo Sunday at the New York Times

I had the oddest sense of deja vu while reading Ross Douthat's column about the Affordable Care Act today immediately after reading Tom Friedman's column about Israel. 

Both were sleight-of-hand defenses of a status quo: an Israel continuously extended on theft of land and a welfare state in statsis that Douthat would not have adapt to mitigate new problems of wealth distribution and risk transfer.

Friedman's column is a mealy-mouthed plug for a book by Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit, which may well be better than Friedman's characterization.  It begins with an even-handedness trope: a plea to view "the real Israel, not the fantasy, do-no-wrong Israel peddled by its most besotted supporters or the do-no-right colonial monster portrayed by its most savage critics." Fair enough. But the column sanitizes the colonial reality, flashing briefly on a bloodless freeze-frame of expelled refugees in 1948 rather than engaging with the continuing and accelerating gobbling of the West Bank.  It then devolves into que sera piety: Palestinians should suck it up and get on with their lives. And by the way, the failure of two-state negotiations is all their fault:

On "moral responsibility" to Israel

Mulling over a jaw-dropping assertion by Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit that the United States has a "moral responsibility" to guarantee Israel that Iran will not obtain a nuclear weapon, Jeffrey Goldberg drops an aside that I find revealing:

(And a small digression: Isn't it Europe, and Germany in particular, that should be considered to have greater moral responsibility here? Israel exists mainly because of European moral failure).