The Way to Israeli, Palestinian Peace

I think the only way there could or would be peace between Israel and the Palestinians is if the following things--four rather simple things--could and would happen and as soon as possible.

First, the Palestinians must stop firing mortars on Israel.  They must also stop tunneling the area. Both, immediately and forever.

Second, Hamas and all Palestinians must recognize Israel and must formally recognize Israel's right to exist. Immediately.  Permanently.

Tbird, Israel must withdraw from Gaza. Again, immediately.

Fourth and finally, Israel must stop its attacks on the Palestinians and must allow Palestinians to trade and function, naturally. Again, immediately and permanently.

Simple. Easy.

Not that simple and unfortunately, likely impossible. At least impossible until minds are opened and changed, anyway. Impossible until the desire for peace and intelligence trumps the desire for war, fighting and revenge, as we have now.

Would that this all already took place, a year ago, two years, three, ten.

It would be nice--great, in fact--if it took place today.

It could happen.  It should.  It won't, it seems.

Ah, well, we can dream, can't we?



Link:  Gaza needs the world's help

The Gaza strip is now unlivable. For the sake of humanity, the international community must require Israel to end this disaster

Chris Hedges on hope

Hope knows that unless we physically defy government control we are complicit in the violence of the state. All who resist keep hope alive. All who succumb to fear, despair and apathy become enemies of hope. They become, in their passivity, agents of injustice. If the enemies of hope are finally victorious, the poison of violence will become not only the language of power but the language of opposition. And those who resist with nonviolence are in times like these the thin line of defense between a civil society and its disintegration.

Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. Hope does not come with the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is an action. Hope is doing something. The more futile, the more useless, the more irrelevant and incomprehensible an act of rebellion is, the vaster and the more potent hope becomes. Hope never makes sense. Hope is weak, unorganized and absurd. Hope, which is always nonviolent, exposes in its powerlessness the lies, fraud and coercion employed by the state. Hope does not believe in force. Hope knows that an injustice visited on our neighbor is an injustice visited on us all. Hope posits that people are drawn to the good by the good. This is the secret of hope’s power and it is why it can never finally be defeated. Hope demands for others what we demand for ourselves. Hope does not separate us from them. Hope sees in our enemy our own face.

Hope is not for the practical and the sophisticated, the cynics and the complacent, the defeated and the fearful. Hope is what the corporate state, which saturates our airwaves with lies, seeks to obliterate. Hope is what our corporate overlords are determined to crush. Be afraid, they tell us. Surrender your liberties to us so we can make the world safe from terror. Don’t resist. Embrace the alienation of our cheerful conformity. Buy our products. Without them you are worthless. Become our brands. Do not look up from your electronic hallucinations to think. No. Above all do not think. Obey.

W.H. Auden wrote:

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are, 
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The powerful do not understand hope. Hope is not part of their vocabulary. They speak in the cold, dead words of national security, global markets, electoral strategy, staying on message, image and money. The powerful protect their own. They divide the world into the damned and the blessed, the patriots and the enemy, the rich and the poor. They insist that extinguishing lives in foreign wars or in our prison complexes is a form of human progress. They cannot see that the suffering of a child in Gaza or a child in the blighted pockets of Washington, D.C., diminishes and impoverishes us all. They are deaf, dumb and blind to hope. Those addicted to power, blinded by self-exaltation, cannot decipher the words of hope any more than most of us can decipher hieroglyphics. Hope to Wall Street bankers and politicians, to the masters of war and commerce, is not practical. It is gibberish. It means nothing.

Any act of rebellion, any physical defiance of those who make war, of those who perpetuate corporate greed and are responsible for state crimes, anything that seeks to draw the good to the good, nourishes our souls and holds out the possibility that we can touch and transform the souls of others. Hope affirms that which we must affirm. And every act that imparts hope is a victory in itself.

Also from Auden:

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute. His newest book is“Death of the Liberal Class.” More information on the Dec. 16 protest can be found at www.stopthesewars.org.

Thanks for the blackmail, Mr. Netanyahu

I love the way Israel blackmailed us this week to give them warplanes, so they wouldn't build more homes in the Gaza.

Nice.

Good friend.

I'm so glad we give this good friend so many millions of dollars.

My thought was, instead of having them blackmail us to stop the additional settlements, we play hard ball and tell them--meaning it--that if they began the additional settlements, we'd withdraw all financial support until they a) cancelled them and b) sat down to earnestly discuss a true, long-lasting, meaningful peace with the Palestinians.  Meantime, tell the Palestinians the same thing--they have to sit down and earnestly work out a peace deal or 1) no financial support of any kind (if, in fact, we give them any) and 2) they must no longer officially call for the elimination of Israel.

But no one asks me.

Enjoy your weekend, everyone.

Link:  http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/11/14

Will we ever learn?

It seems the answer is "no".

The question is, will the American people ever learn that the answer to all questions and needs is not, in fact, to throw money at the problem.

Two examples come to mind recently.

One headline I saw this week points out the President Obama is requesting $634 billion over the next 10 years for a "health care overhaul".

What a mistake.

We don't need to throw even MORE money at our health care system. Doctors and hospitals and insurance companies have taken too much money from the system already.

Money INTO the system isn't the issue. Too much of our home incomes and national wealth is already spent on health care. (And defense, too, but that's another article).

What we need to do with our health care system is what the rest of the world has already successfully done--and that is, take the profit--the ugly, fat, oversized, bloated, killing profit--out of health care in the United States.

But it won't happen.

We don't have the will or the understanding to make this happen.

We’ll never get the health care system we need because the American answer to health care is to throw more money at it when what we really need to do is take the profit out of health care, the way the rest of the world has done. Everywhere but here in the US. We love profits. We love corporations. We’re greedy.

And stupid.

The other news note I saw this week was that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just got back from the Middle East and is asking for--did you see this?--900 million dollars to rebuild the Gaza Strip.

Are you effin' kidding me?

In the first place, continuing to support the madness that continues to go on in the Middle East just makes us ridiculous enablers. Shooting, killing and blowing each other up in the Middle East should stop, period. Everyone would agree to that. Throwing money at rebuilding that mess again and again just allows for it to go on.

Years ago, when we used to have money in the United States, this wouldn't have made sense, either. But now that we're either near-broke or financially bankrupt (and it's hard to argue we're not), it's beyond our capacity. We can't afford it any longer, clearly.

We're broke, folks.

We can't any longer afford to throw money--big, small or whatever--at our problems.

We can't be the drunken sailor with our money--and our future--any longer.



Link to stories described above:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/obama_budget
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090224/ap_on_re_mi_ea/israel_us