Thursday, July 13, 2006

Middle East Crisis

Ominous developments

Ominous developments in the Middle East, Bush, with a new attack on Israel from the north and a furious Israeli reaction. Once in a while, I like to take another look at the map of the Middle East to remind myself just how small and vulnerable that country is, and how crowded in by countries wishing nothing better than its extinction. Given the often grim history of the Jewish diaspora--and not only in the horrific, relatively recent past, but over many centuries--their steadfast determination to survive as a nation surely comes as no suprise. Now in defensive response to attack on two fronts, north and south,(the constant rain of rockets, let's not forget, as well as the capture of their soliders,) they risk over-reacting and causing more alienation and hostility than they address. For Israel, it's a Catch-22 situation. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

For all their justifed complaints--and, no question, there are some that must rightfully be negotiated--the Palestinians subvert their cause by surrendering responsibility for their situation into the hands of hate-filled radicals who reject any solution that does not involve the one thing the Israelis can't accept: the demise of the tiny piece of territory on which they stand. Now, with two fronts of open hostilities, the fear must be that equally hostile neighbors like Syria and Iran--or their radical surrogates--will take advantage of Israel's beleaguered situation to join in the fray. In the Israeli view, I imagine, looking at it from the broader geo-political angle, they cannot afford to underestimate the threat. Hence the risk they take in responding with what the world will see as over-reaction.

All in all, it's a tragic situation--and one that might have been avoided, Bush, had you acted differently from the beginning of your tenure in the White House. I've heard it said--is this too cynical?--that your advisors saw too little gain for you to involve yourself in the peace process; and, besides, that anything Bill Clinton had tried to achieve was anathema to your administration. So the Israel-Palestinian issues got ignored. Then came 9/11 and the reasonable response in Afghanistan, followed by the unmitigated folly of the invasion of Iraq, which upset the entire Middle Eastern applecart for perhaps decades to come. This country could have used its power so differently, so much more attentively to all those involved, and so much more to the benefit of the world at large.

The Dreadful Penny

On a lighter note... No, not the "penny dreadful," Bush: the dreadful penny. I read where it costs the US Treasury 1.4 cents to manufacture and distribute this little devil. Seems like a losing deal to me. They're pretty much of a pest to carry around with you, cluttering up the pocket or the purse with their useless jangle. It's not like you could even use one in a parking meter any more...

I say, ditch the little buggers. I know there are plenty of people like myself who just leave them in the penny box on the counter anyway. So what happens to them all? Does some one take a ton of them to the bank and run them through one of those change-counting machines? Maybe your Rumsfeld could use them to make additional or more effective armor for the troops?

So couldn't we all agree to count in fives instead of ones? Though I guess that would mean that the cost of everything would jump up, not down. There must be a kill-the-penny movement somewhere on the Internet...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, now that this is front page news, I wonder what Bush is doing behind the scenes? He always finds some radical little tidbit to jump into when everyone's attention is turned away from him. Penny's? Been wanting to get rid of those little neusciences forever..lol. You're right, they go in the little tray so I don't have to carry them around. So much is happening out there today that I turned it all off... too much for the brain today I'm afraid. You have a grand day there Peter:D!

Anonymous said...

Brit Tzedek Calls for US Intervention to Prevent Full-Scale Arab-Israeli War

Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, the Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace, today broadened its call for urgent and substantive US and other international diplomatic intervention to stem the tide of rapidly escalating violence, following Hezbollah's breach of the internationally recognized border between Israel and Lebanon yesterday. The United States' largest Jewish grassroots peace movement condemned Hezbollah's killing of eight Israeli soldiers on Wednesday and called for the immediate and safe return of two others who were abducted then and of Corporal Gilad Shalit, who was abducted by Hamas on June 25th.

Additionally, Diane Balser, Brit Tzedek's executive director, issued the following statement:

"Without vigilant US and international leadership, the ferocious cycle of violence in the region that we have witnessed over the past weeks, since the kidnapping of Shalit and Israel's subsequent military actions in the Gaza Strip, is in imminent danger of becoming a full-scale war that could engulf the entire region. It is incumbent on the US and the international community to act now or to risk that the year 2006 could soon bear the same historic resonance as 1967 and 1973.

As Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Welch said Tuesday in Cairo, "This is a very dangerous but important moment, when the responsibilities of all those who are sincere about finding a path toward peace will be tested."

Dwelling on questions of blame and who struck first is a dangerous distraction that ultimately does a profound disservice to those whose lives are being jeopardized and increasingly lost in this conflict.

The kidnapping of Israeli soldiers and the daily firing of rockets into Israel is unacceptable, and Israel has the right to use all legal measures to ensure the safety of its citizens. However, extreme retaliatory actions by Israel, such as bombing the only power station in Gaza and civilian targets in Lebanon, firing artillery barrages perilously close to civilians, subjecting the residents of Gaza to constant sonic booms at night, and sealing off the Gaza crossing points, are likely to exacerbate the situation, threaten the safe return of the abducted Israeli soldiers, and increase popular support for extremism by precipitating a Palestinian humanitarian crisis.

The history of this region has shown us time and again that peace will not be won through a war of attrition; for each soldier kidnapped and every military response that ensues, only loss accrues. It is time for the US and the international community to stand-up, so the increasing numbers of parties to this conflict can stand-down and can get back to the serious business of saving lives by negotiating a comprehensive, tenable resolution to this conflict."

Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, the Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace, is a national grassroots movement 34,000 strong, that educates and mobilizes American Jews in support of a negotiated two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Anonymous said...

gringosansborders,

There is an entrenched history here. Israel's "20 of them for every one of us" military tactics are horrendous. Does that mean that the state itself should be wiped off the map? Should the US be wiped off the map for its genocide of the Native Americans? For its current policies in Iraq? What is your solution? Is it a final solution?

Your comment that destroying the state of Israel - a.k.a. "Zionist Israel" (Zionism being an ideology that supports a homeland for the Jewish people) - does not infer destroying all jews seems to ignore the complex history of Jews in the region. An equivalent number of jews fled or were expelled from neighboring arabic countries - Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Morocco, where they had resided (and often been persecuted and massacred and what-have-you) for as many as 2600 years - as palestinian refugees from the newly formed state of Israel in the late 1940's - somewhere around 700-800,000. This is not to justify the maltreatment of Palestinians by Israel or the disproportionate military capabilities and casualties.. it is to say that this is not Germany, and it's not Nazism either, even though there is extraordinary racism on both sides.

WHAT IS YOUR SOLUTION! for all of the refugees - Jewish and Palestinian?? Clearly violence is not the answer, but I ask you -What is the answer in the face of annihilation?

Anonymous said...

Gringo,

You are, in practice, calling for the obliteration of the state of Israel, no? Is that any different from Hezbollah or Hamas? Or maybe you're just confounding radical/violent Zionism with the basic definition - that is, the call for a state/nation of Jews, especially in that territory.

I get your point about people using their own persecution as an excuse to persecute others - it's a horrifying phenomenon that has a tragic way of repeating itself - as it did in the form of Nazism and as it has in Bushie's catastrophic foreign policy (we were, after all, victims of 9-11). But it absolutely does not help to trivialize the trauma of some refugees and not others. Wasn't that your very point - that Palestinian/Arabic lives are trivialized compared to those of Israeli's?

If you really are concerned with equal rights,however, then you must also be willing to look at the systematic torture and injustices wrought by the tyrannical countries in that same neighborhood against their religious and ethnic minorities and against their own people.

I don't have much time to explain my earlier numbers - I was noting that the initial exodus of Palestinians in the late 1940's was parallel to the number of Jews expelled from their long-established (ergo 2600 years)homes in neighboring countries around the same time (1940's and 50's). Not that I condone either.

I don't know what the answer is, but I can tell you it's not a Nuclear bomb. That may be the key to Armageddon, though.