In response to the Iranian regime’s violence, the Green Movement protests have grown bolder. The regime now seems stuck in a self-perpetuating cycle, in which almost every action it takes in response to the protests seems to only further erode its standing among Iranians and strengthen the opposition.

And this is at the heart of what the protesters are seeking to do – delegitimize the regime until it simply can’t stand. In an attempt to break out of this trap, the regime today ginned up counterrevolutionary protests – ordering people to attend and offering free metro transit. In a similar vein, the regime has sought to paint the protests as a Western-inspired plot. So what we are seeing is a struggle for legitimacy – for the hearts and minds of the average Iranian.

Yet as Iran erupts, the far-right in the US wants to lend the regime a lifeline. John Bolton said yesterday:

I would say that mere rhetorical support for the demonstrators, for the opposition is not enough. …If we’re going to support them, we should support them tangibly, with financial support, communications, perhaps other support, as well…Will some of the guns go to the side of the demonstrators? If they do, there’s a chance the regime could fall. If they don’t, I think the disparity in power between the government and the opposition is simple too great, and so the most likely outcome is Ahmadinejad and the regime stay in power.

The best way to undermine the movement is to do exactly what Bolton is advocating. It is true that no matter what the regime will claim the protests are part of a western plot – the regime is already doing this – but this claim while perhaps persuading a few, doesn’t appear to be all that persuasive given the breadth of the protests. Yet if Obama were to read a speech from the John Bolton playbook, the regime’s claims all of a sudden become a lot more persuasive. While the regime is not going to loop on state-television a clip of Obama saying the crackdown is brutal, it sure would loop a statement of Obama saying the US is going to work to forcefully support the Green Movement. Such a statement would be music to the regime’s ears and would allow them to regain the nationalist mantel that is slipping out of their grasp.

But Bolton’s statement at its core also exposes a totally ignorant view of power and democratic change. To Bolton, and his colleagues like John McCain on the right, legitimacy is all about military force. The protests are therefore doomed because they don’t have the guns. In this simplistic view, the only thing that the US can do to support the doomed Green Movement is to somehow get guns in the hands of the protesters or to take the regime out by force before they take out the protesters.

But this completely ignores how most democratic transitions have occurred in the last half-century. What we see right now in Iran looks a lot like democratic movements that swept in democratic governments throughout much of the world. Importantly, most of these movements replaced authoritarian regimes – often brutal military dictatorships that were desperate to hold onto power – through inexhaustible mass protests that eroded any support of the sitting government and eventually forced the regime to cave. This was the case with Franco’s regime in Spain, Argentina’s military junta, the Soviet bloc countries of Eastern Europe, among many others. Violence often took place during these transitions, but the primary factors that brought on the collapse was not a military rebellion led by an insurgent force that suddenly storms the capital, but as result of gradual erosion of support by mass movements. This is why the regime is so paranoid about losing legitimacy, they have seen how this movie ends in countless other countries.

No one knows how or when things are going to end in Iran. In transitions to democracy, there is no magic formula, no set timeframe, and no assurance that a regime will ever capitulate even if its legitimacy is completely lost. But what we are witnessing is a regime in a tailspin, where every action it takes in reaction to a broad popular movement only further erodes its standing and strengthens that movement. Instead, of getting in the way of this vicious cycle and shifting the focus away from the regime and toward the United States we should simply get out of the way. As even Pat Buchanan argued last summer:

When your adversary is making a fool of himself, get out of the way… U.S. fulminations will change nothing in Tehran. But they would enable the regime to divert attention to U.S. meddling in Iran’s affairs.

Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon takes to the Wall Street Journal op-ed page to argue that the West Bank, where numerous aspects of Palestinian life continue to be proscribed by Israeli military law, as they have been for over forty years, is not really occupied. Ayalon complains that “little appears to be truly understood about Israel’s rights to what are generally called the ‘occupied territories’ but what really are ‘disputed territories.’”

That’s because the land now known as the West Bank cannot be considered “occupied” in the legal sense of the word as it had not attained recognized sovereignty before Israel’s conquest. [...]

After the war in 1967, when Jews started returning to their historic heartland in the West Bank, or Judea and Samaria, as the territory had been known around the world for 2,000 years until the Jordanians renamed it, the issue of settlements arose. However, [U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Eugene V.] Rostow found no legal impediment to Jewish settlement in these territories. He maintained that the original British Mandate of Palestine still applies to the West Bank. He said “the Jewish right of settlement in Palestine west of the Jordan River, that is, in Israel, the West Bank, Jerusalem, was made unassailable. That right has never been terminated and cannot be terminated except by a recognized peace between Israel and its neighbors.” There is no internationally binding document pertaining to this territory that has nullified this right of Jewish settlement since.

And yet, there is this perception that Israel is occupying stolen land and that the Palestinians are the only party with national, legal and historic rights to it.

On it’s face, this is a laughably tendentious argument, the sort that one would find in the pages of Commentary but that’s not taken particularly seriously by actual legal scholars or historians. Unfortunately, given that the Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel has taken it up, it has to be taken seriously, at least in as much as it indicates the extreme irredentist views of the current Israeli government.

Leaving aside the appeals to the authority of the British Mandate — the right of European colonial powers to carve up and give away their subjects’ land in the first place is, let’s just say, not uncontroversial — Ayalon’s quoting of Rostow is very selective. Rostow recognized in no uncertain terms (in the very same piece that Ayalon references, in fact) that the West Bank was occupied territory.

As did former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, decidedly not a Palestinian nationalist, who admirably cut through the bull in 2003 and acknowledged the bare fact: “You cannot like the word, but what is happening is an occupation — to hold 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation. I believe that is a terrible thing for Israel and for the Palestinians.” Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert, also affirmed this view, noting in reference to the resentment and hatred created by Israel’s military control of over 3 million Palestinians that “We see the occupation as problematic.”

As to the notion that the previous status of the territories as Jordanian-administered somehow absolved Israel from its commitments under the Geneva Conventions, this argument was actually made and rejected by the Israeli foreign ministry’s own legal counsel before the first settlement brick was even laid. As recounted by Israeli journalist and historian Gershom Gorenberg — whose history of the settlements “The Accidental Empire” is well worth reading — “the legal counsel of the Foreign Ministry, Theodor Meron, was asked whether international law allowed settlement in the newly conquered land.”

In a memo marked “Top Secret,” Mr. Meron wrote unequivocally, “My conclusion is that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

In the detailed opinion that accompanied that note, Mr. Meron explained that the Convention — to which Israel was a signatory — forbade an occupying power from moving part of its population to occupied territory. [...]

Mr. Meron took note of Israel’s diplomatic argument that the West Bank was not “normal” occupied territory, because the land’s status was uncertain. The prewar border with Jordan had been a mere armistice line, and Jordan had annexed the West Bank unilaterally.

But he rejected that argument for two reasons. The first was diplomatic: the international community would not accept it and would regard settlement as showing “intent to annex the West Bank to Israel.” The second was legal, he wrote: “In truth, certain Israeli actions are inconsistent with the claim that the West Bank is not occupied territory.” For instance, he noted, a military decree issued on the third day of the war in June said that military courts must apply the Geneva Conventions in the West Bank.

Unfortunately, the Israeli government ignored Meron’s legal advice, and developed a series of shifting legal rationales to justify the annexation and colonization of the occupied land, which has helped to create the exceedingly difficult and volatile situation we have today.

Attempts at arriving at an internationally recognized legal dispensation for the land of Israel-Palestine have been based on the understanding that the land is legitimately claimed by two peoples, and that neither of those two peoples are going to get all of what they want. Mr. Ayalon’s argument turns this understanding on its head. Israel currently controls around 75% of what was Palestine — land on which Israel recognizes no Palestinian claim, and indeed which the current Israeli government insists the Palestinians must relinquish any claim even before negotiations.

At the same time, the current Israeli government now also insists that Israel’s own claims on the remaining 25% must be taken into account. Yet, in rejecting this frame-up, we’re apparently supposed to believe that it’s the Palestinians who aren’t being reasonable.