A Fool's Game

Things have heated up again, as they do every time a new US president tries to make his mark on history and sends his envoys to beat someone up in order to force a settlement in the middle east. The truth is that it is an unsolvable problem because each side wants the same unique piece of geography.

I recently read an article which mused that Israel someday will be serious about trading land for peace. It seems to me that Israel has very little land left to trade away, especially for some evanescent "peace" which is sometimes nothing more than a temporary lull in the existential threat. The arabs are like the mafia running a protection racket. When you stop paying, they go back to destroying your store or beating you up or worse.

All of history proves that the arabs will never give up their demands for what they want. To them, Israel is a cancer patient and they are the doctors. They say: cut off this limb and you'll live a little longer, cut out this organ and you'll feel better for a while, but we know, and they do as well, that eventually you'll be so weakened from the amputations and operations that you'll die from the treatment. If you give them a State of Palestine, regardless of their promises and international guarantees, they will use it as a platform to rearm for a while and then once again to attack Israel. They want all of the Mediterranean coast and won't stop till they have it.

This isn't a fictive scenario. Germany did the same thing, under far more restrictive conditions than would be imposed in a mideast two state arrangement, during the interregnum between the two world wars. They rearmed and again tried to expand their borders to what they considered their historical ethnic territory.

And now comes Jimmy Carter, private citizen, the most feckless and incompetent US president in history, with a long record of virulent anti-Israel bias,to further muddy the waters. He has meetings with bloodthirsty terrorists and murderers dressed in western style suits to further the impression they wish to convey that they are civilized humans, to plot against Israel and its allies. The US has suffered for 35 years from this bumbling fool, first as a president who brought our country to the nadir of its popularity and then as the poster child for every crackpot cause that took his fancy and made the US look bad. He can best be described by Harry Truman's phrase: "itinerant saboteur."

I think Carter is the last straw. No one is serious and nothing is going to change. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.