[Chris Alger]

"Somehow I would guess that you would find a way to hold the USA responsible for all of the above."

Nope.

As for obfuscations, let me clarify.

Pipes and M contend that diplomacy with Palestinians is useless as long as many of them seek the destruction of the Jewish state, or the "liberation of historic Palestine." They contend that any agreement will be, at best, pointless because Palestinian opposition to the existence of Israel means that too many of them willl remain committed to using violence and unlawful force, or maybe some other illegitimate means, to wreck Israel.

These two statements, however, don't follow and in fact are grounded in a certain deliberate ambiguity concerning the Israel's "right to exist" and what opposing it actually means. If the phrase has any meaning, it is the right of Israel to exist under its current ideology as a Jewish state, as opposed to a state that makes no distinction regarding the ethnicity of its citizens.

History provides numerous examples of states conducting successful diplomacy while remaining fundamentally antagonistic toward the other party's official ideology or raison d'etre. U.S. diplomacy with the USSR is a striking example of countries that could produce workable agreements even though at least one of them considered the other an "evil empire" and both maintained a constant state of military tension toward each other. Israel's own agreements with Egypt and Jordan are more obvious examples: neither Arab country was called upon to acknowledge the Israel's "right to exist," yet the peace between these countries has endured and the border disputes between them have been largely resolved.

The deliberate exploitation of ambiguity occurs because any opposition to Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state is commonly interpreted as violent opposition to the right of Jews to a homeland in the former Palestine or violent opposition to Jews generally. Israel's right to exist is used indifferently with the rights of Jews to exist, an unstated assumption that has particular force due to the holocaust.

That's why I distinguished the nation of Jews from the state of Israel. If you need any further examples as to why this distinction matters, consider the positions of many Jews (like Einstein) that opposed the creation of a Jewish state, some of whom lived in the former mandatory Palestine and considered themselves committed Zionists. Tom Segev's One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate is an good source.