A conversation! A veritable ongoing conversation! A conversation that was devoutly wished. That is what I and the good people at Americans for Peace Now had been hoping would here happen, and it has. I refer, of course, to the comments at the end of mine of last week, readily accessible on this site. And because the matter there discussed is of more than passing import, I propose to respond to those comments – not, heaven forbid, because I need the last word (although, come to think of it, I don’t mind having it, not at all) but because it is as close as we who spend this time in cyberspace can come to having an honest-to-goodness interchange.

(All kidding aside, the knowledge, intelligence and civility of our correspondents comes as a relief. There were, in fact, one or two crude submissions – boorish, vituperative – of the sort that are not unknown in spaces such as this but are decisively unwelcome here. But only one or two, may their numbers decrease.)
Read on…