Slate staff members discuss the current crisis.

I now realize what's so annoyingly inapposite about the references to "appeasement" by the Israel-Doesn't-Make-a-Difference brigade. David Greenberg writes:

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The hatred that fuels this new terrorism is so deep that a Palestinian state can't possibly appease it.

It's not just the bogus on-off quality of "appease" in this sentence--the implication that either the hatred in question is completely "appeased" or else nothing has happened. (What if the hatred is merely reduced, not eliminated? Isn't that a good thing? Or does Greenberg actually think it won't be reduced at all?) The entire underlying "appeasement" concept--also employed by William Safire and Emily Yoffe--doesn't fit.

To put it crudely, in "appeasement" you take the guy who is trying to kill you and give him some of what he wants, hoping he'll be satisfied and stop. That's basically what happened with "Neville Chamberlain's attempts to placate Hitler," the example invoked explicitly by Yoffe (and implicitly by anyone else who's used the word "appease" since 1938). But the reason Israel makes a difference is not that a peace with the PLO would please the people who want to kill us, namely Osama Bin Laden and other radical Islamic terrorists. Nobody's trying to please them. They'll presumably go on trying to kill us unless we stop them. The object is to sway third parties, basically Arabs and Muslims who do not now want to kill us because they are not now terrorists--but who might become terrorists (e.g., al-Qaida recruits) in the future, maybe years or even decades from now.

A better analogy is with U.S. attempts to fight Communism by ensuring Western Europe's prosperity after World War II. We sent Europe aid, promoted trade and fostered non-Communist labor unions in the hope (realistic, it turned out) that if workers in France, England, Italy, and West Germany were relatively well-off, they would be less likely to become Communists. The idea wasn't to "appease" Russia, or Communism generally, or Communists in Western Europe in particular. The idea was to influence third parties who could go either way. Would Yoffe, Greenberg, et al call the Marshall Plan appeasement?

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