The Insufferable Idiocy
It’s interesting that the Bush administration changed its tune on a cease-fire in the latest Israel-Hezbollah conflict right after the Saudis came out on the side of and end to hostilities, isn’t it?
But I’m going to leave that alone for a second to look at the longer view. Yo! Israel! Yo! Hamas! Yo! Hezbollah! You’ve been at this for almost sixty years now. You have all used the same strategies, the same tactics; you have spouted the same inflamed rhetoric. Guess what? It hasn’t worked!
If, after sixty years of doing things basically the same way and failing at it, don’t you all think it might be time to try something different? Don’t you all think you should face some basic realities and begin to deal with them instead of playing a deadly game of the Hatfields and the McCoys?
Reality #1. Israel is here to stay. Arguments about its legitimacy, about its past treatment of Palestinians, about its inherent Jewishness are pretty moot at this point. It is going to be a permanent and powerful player in the region. Learn to live with it.
Reality #2. The Palestinians have a point. I’m enough of a Zionist to say that Israel does have a right to exist. But the Jewish people were absent from the area to a large degree for a thousand years or more during the Diaspora. That did not mean the area was unoccupied, and those who were there have a right to live, even if they have to share. But sharing means the kid with all the marbles, in this case Israel, also has to play fair.
Reality #3. The fighting is based on the inability of the other side to recognize that both sides reason the same way. The Civil War historian Shelby Foote once recounted a conversation between a Union soldier and a Confederate in which the Union man asked the man in Grey why he was fighting the war, and the Confederate responded “Cuz ya’ll are down here!” When you realize that your own reaction to violent incursions, random shelling, rocket attacks, and suicide bombs would itself be a violent one, then you can begin to realize why your own violent actions are doomed to fail. It doesn’t make the other side stop; it just makes them hate you more.
Reality #4. If it weren’t land considered holy by the world’s three largest monotheistic religions, no one would care. Look at Darfur. Look at Somalia. Tragic. But nobody sings Christmas carols called “Little Town of Mogadishu.” There is little but history in the area of Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon that has any actual value. Oh date palms, I suppose, olive groves. But we’ve got those in California. This means one thing: the only way you people are ever going to be really successful financially is if you all calm the hell down and work together to rob rich American Christians and Jews and rich Arab Muslims of their free-flowing tourist dollars. Now, with $3 billion a year in U.S. subsidies, Israel doesn’t really have to worry, but nobody is going to go there if they think they’re going to get blown up, and that hurts the merchant on the street come Christmas and Passover.
We’re so busy playing “You started it!” and “He’s the bad guy!” that we forget the real problem: there are no good guys in this case. Everybody is to blame. It’s time we all started to act like grown ups on the international stage and accept our guilt. And then move toward a functional solution.