"Very Successful in Containing the Palestinian Issue"

Gidi Greenstein to Jeffrey Goldberg, in response to a question about the importance of settling the conflict with the Palestinians:

I think that we have been very successful in containing the Palestinian issue. What I mean by containing is that day-to-day decisions of the vast majority of the Israel population are unaffected by our conflict with the Palestinians. This is precisely the opposite of what the Palestinians wanted to achieve. They wanted to bring chaos.

I was going to cut out everything but the first sentence of the quote (which would have been misleading) for effect but then I realized it really wasn't necessary: it is astonishing how utterly solipsistic this is, and how far from the answer that a humane person would give to the same question. (Perhaps Marty Peretz is right: you can know a Jewish charlatan when he starts talking about "tikkun olam.")