Skip to main content

Israel, Palestine, and Insults to Intelligence

The amount of deliberate misrepresentation by politicians is an insult to intelligence!


For example, Barack Obama recently said that Israel and the Palestinians had to come to terms with each other, and admit the right of both to exist as states.  To do that, he said, they should begin with the 1967 borders, and make mutually agreeable land swaps to modify that boundary.


The Israeli Prime Minister howled.  "The 1967 border is indefensible; unacceptable!"  In our own country, politicians are lamenting that Obama is a fool; that the 1967 line cannot be the border between the two populations.


O.K.  Obama did not say that.  He said that the two groups should begin with the 1967 border, and make mutually agreeable land swaps to that line.  Mutually agreeable land swaps.    Israel will demand this.  The Palestinians will demand that.  Israel will offer this.  The Palestinians will offer that.  If they do that, both will be happy, both will be angry, both will grumble and wish there were a god who could apply the wisdom of Solomon, but they just might end up with two independent states, and the line will not be the 1967 line, but will reflect lots of swaps and compromises!


It isn't just posturing on the part of politicians.  It is that, but it is also evidence that either they are stupid, or they think we are.  Maybe both.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more