The Mess in Israel

If you are a Republican voter think about this:

Only six GOP senators out of 50 wanted to know what happened at our capitol on Jan 6 and who was responsible. What happened to the other 44?

Mitch McConnell stopped the commission because he knows it will confirm the guilt of Donald Trump and reveal other GOP conspirators. He also knows it will drag out into 2022 and he doesn’t want people asking questions about GOP traitors with an election happening.

Every time you hear a GOP politician talk about bi-partisanship you know he’s talking about something he wants to stop in its tracks.

*****

Michael Lewis is the kind of writer I wanted to be when I grew up. It still hasn’t happened and maybe that’s because there can only be one Michael Lewis. He writes brilliantly about important stuff. His new book is The Premonition, is about the pandemic. What catches my attention about Lewis is when he talks about the “Money Gene.” Although he never says so, it appears to be something that spreads at GOP conventions and other gatherings of those who just want more and don’t care how they get it

****

Andrew McKlosky, the asshole that aimed an automatic weapon at protestors walkingpast his house on their way to confront he mayor of their town is now running for the Senate. As if we don’t have enough morons in the Senate now.

Sure you can laugh your ass off at this clown who runs ads saying he protected his home and family against a mob that had come to kill them and burn the home to the ground, but don’t forget, assholes like this get elected all the time. Ohio elected Jim Jordan, a failed gym teacher who protected a pervert on the school’s sports staff, thereby exposing hundreds of students to his predation. Now he makes a living shouting louder than anyone else in congress. So watch out or you may get another Jordan, or Gaetz, or Greene or Rand Paul. As long as the GOP is home to this kind of sociopathic clown it is in no position to be allowed to participate in our nation’s government.

*****

Michael Flynn, the convicted criminal who Donald Trump made his National Security Advisor is now telling groups of QAnon fanatics that the United States should have a military coup like the one that recently took place in Myanmar. Now stop me if I’m wrong but I believe that calling for the overthrow of the government of the United States is treason, punishable by death.

What happened was an audience member at a recent speaking engagement, too ignorant to pronounce the name Myanmar correctly asked, “I’m a Marine and I want to know, why what happened in Minanmar  (his pronunciation) can’t happen here?” to which Flynn replied, “No reason, it should happen here.”

There was much screaming and cheering by a group of people who probably don’t know where Myanmar is and what really happened there, but after all they do believe in magic. It’s just a question of when Jim Jones shows up with the Kool Aide.

*****

The violence in Israel has created a situation where the Israeli’s and Hamas have reached the point of all out war.

People are dying while neither the Israelis nor Hamas have the leadership that is capable of sitting down and coming to some kind of peaceful agreement. The rest of the Middle East, sick of the nonsense going on in that nation, have looked away, more interested in getting solutions in Yemen, Iran and Syria.

After decades of fighting there is almost no common ground and the desire for revenge on both sides now far outdistances any thoughts of settlement. And of course as in all such situations both sides are equally at fault. The Israelis continue to build and occupy on the West Bank and the Palestinians led by Hamas continue to attack from Gaza.

Yes, there is a real solution but neither side will even consider it, even though it makes perfect or almost perfect sense and very well could establish some kind of peace.

So what is it? The basis of the battle has always been the need to separate Israelis and Palestinians yet keep them adjacent with some sense of unity that can almost never exist. What we have to work with are two pieces of land, the West Bank and Gaza, into which both sides have managed to force the wrong populations.

First there is Gaza, potentially a great port area that has somehow from the beginning of the conflict managed to remain nothing but an awful slum from which Hamas has continuously attacked the rest of Israel. The second is the West Bank, which Israel ceded to the Palestinians but immediately began to grab back, establishing so-called settlements, built for Israelis and off limits to Palestinians. It has never worked so why not try something new, something based on a logical thought process, something that both parties might benefit from. Those who oppose it will consider it an impossible logistical problem, but it could be done, and I am sure it would eventually lead to peace and better living conditions for all.

It’s really very simple and at the same time unbelievably complicated because it involves the removal of all Israelis from the West Bank and all Palestinians from Gaza and settling them in new homes. Now, before you get your balls in an uproar, listen to the potential results. It’s already been posited that it would be an enormous logistical and financial problem but the decades long war hasn’t exactly been cheap and the logistics have been staggering without even considering the loss of life, so consider the result of such a plan.

You would be moving Palestinians out of Gaza which they have never been able to make function and shipping them into the much better housing that the Israeli’s have created in their settlements on the West Bank. You will also be bringing together the now split Palestinian population into one location right next to a friendly Jordan. On the other side you would be uprooting the Jewish population of the West Bank, a location they should never have occupied and moving them into a location with the potential to be the best in the nation. Location alone makes Gaza a real estate developer’s wet dream.

Sure, we’re talking about huge sums of money but how much has this war cost, not only in money but also in human lives and misery?

Looks great right? But it will never work. It would work, if those involved in the peace process were honest brokers but unfortunately that will never be the case.

The original problem, faced by the Brits when they created Israel was, how do you placate a people (the Palestinians) when you have given away their country, a country you never actually owned.

The Brits did a good thing in creating Israel but they were too lazy and too invested in getting out of the Empire business to bother to do it the right way. Pushing the Palestinians to the side and giving the Jews part of their land was a copout not a solution and it left a simmering pot that seventy-five years later is still boiling over. It would have been much easier in 1945 to carve out a piece of Palestine adjacent to the Jordanian border, give it some access to Jerusalem and set the Jews up where they already were, in what was left. I say easier, not easy, but the Brits wanted to do their good and politically functional deal and get out, so they did.

Now there are so many bad actors involved and so much political bullshit that has nothing to do with the real problem that things have reached the impossible stage.

Now the problem is about Abbas trying to look like the leader of Hamas and the Palestinians when Iran is really calling the shots. Now the problem is about Netanyahu staying out of jail by creating a war that brings all the hawks to his support.

It is absolutely a fact that Israel, which has been the constant target of Arab attacks for 75 years has a right to defend itself but when Israeli policies drive Arabs to acts of civil disobedience that encourage the war mongers to create violent situations they begin to lose that right of self-defense or at least decay it.

Now that the rival Israeli parties have finally coalesced to get rid of Netanyahu there may be some hope that at least a cease fire can hold but the guy the Israelis are looking at as their new leader, Naftali Bennett, is even more of a war monger than Bibi. None of it is very encouraging.