When Norwegian UN fellow Terje Roed-Larsen was on Israeli TV a few weeks ago, he made a remark about taking the supposedly monolithic international consensus about the West Bank/Gaza and beginning to implement it on the ground. I couldn't believe that he really expected Israel to just soak up attacks on its civilians and submit to one of the plans that many Israelis perceive as a step towards erasing us from the map.

Larsen's remarks sounded disingenuous to me at the time, but this Mark Steyn article (on general European politics) suggests something else: an autocratic attitude which ignors the desires and fears of ordinary people - as well as the facts on the ground.