There is apparently going to be a Likud government after Feb. elections. What can one do, in Israel, then, if one is not of that party? How can one act, act, to create a place for local alternative? Why does no one speak to the Israeli Arabs? Are there any Israeli Arabs reading this blog? Will they speak? Are they afraid to speak?

Instead of mouthing to alter the greater world, what of one’s home, in Israel? Speaking of established platfrom positions is too easy. Speak where action, without the State, is possible.

I apologize for arrogantly interfering yet again. But probably doesn’t mean I will stop.

and i’m sure that, whenever they faced obstacles, chaim weizmann and ben-gurion and menachem begin etc etc all said in the ’20s and ’30s and ’40s, as they dramatically changed the demographic landscape *against the will of the indigenous majority* “oh well, so it goes.” (Not! and for fun, compare jewish views on how the local population ought to react to immigration of “others” in the ’20s for example to their attitude attitude now. have a look at any israeli statement on the right of return…. compared to the right of jewish immigration against the will of locals 70 years ago.)

yes, there are competing narratives. likud’s public, unwavering commitment to prevent– EVER– the formation of an arab state between the jordan and sea (read the peace and security chapter of their platform at any/every point in history) gets ZERO airtime. yet all practically anyone knows about hamas is “they deny israel’s right to exist!”

Yes, there are competing narratives. and hundreds of Billions of american dollars, F-16s, cluster bombs, laser guided bombs, apache attack helicopters, main battle tanks and so on can tip the scales.

i’m sure if the arabs had, and used, those kinds of resources to kill thousands of israel civilians in this decade alone, you would simply say “oh well. whatever.”

there’s nothing vague about it.

America has been at war or preparing for the next war for over two centuries…every 100 years or so the Europeans engage in a massive blood-letting…

the competition of narratives is the sin qua non of human existence…Isocrates, circa the 5th century BC, wrote extensively about the “godless Persians…”…it never stops and it’s never going to stop…

simply consider the number of competing narratives and players involved and try to game out how anyone could maneuver everyone towards a long-term agreement…

Arabs, Arab moderates, Arab radicals and extremists, American Jews and Isralie Jews (and let’s be clear about how little a monolitich strucre there is in contemporary Jewish society; LA vs Shaker Heights vs Florida vs S.F. versus Manhattan vs upstate, vs Queens, vs Tel Aviv vs Paris, etc, etc, etc), European leftists and intellectuals, bankers, oil barons, arms dealers, drug dealers, religious pathologies galore and what do you have? You have a novel by Yaakov Shabtai or Mafouz…you have Tolstoy or Faulkner on the Jordan…and as one of the Barthelme brothers put it years ago: at the Tolstoy museum, things just keep happening…

If it’s not Bin Laden it will be someone or something else…and people keep getting riled up and foaming at the mouth saying, IF only everyone were reasonable…IF only…the Arabs…If only the hawks…IF only the doves…IF…IF…IF…

But instead after 10,000 years of this thing called civilization we can make a few vague guesses about how people behave and how things work…and it never looks good…war and more war and some disaster that was glimpsed only vaguely…and then it all starts all over again…exactly like a Faulkner novel…or Homer…or as Amichai put it: “They have put up many flags…we have put up many flags…”

There will be no peace…eventually “Jordan” will become Palestine (Tolstoy adding an addendum to Thucydides was right that history comes down to the mass movement of people) because of a demographic tidal wave and the corollary of the Arab oil elite abandoning their own for the cultural morphology of living in the west…

200 years from now the “Arabs” will be one sad step closer to cultural irrelevancy as they fade back into the desert and the oil money evaporates…the wealthy ones will turn into Brits and New Yorkers…the poor ones will look like something out of Mad Max…and without oil…no one will care about them…

Once upon a time…people were terrified of the Medici…and the Borges…

Now…not so much…

As Kurt Vonnegut put it…so it goes…

I doubt Rosner is a neocon. But he’s not afraid of the Mitchell report, he disagrees with it. There is no question who created the 2nd Intifada, it was the Palestinians. Whether it was Arafat or the Masses actually doesn’t matter that much.

Neither fairness nor unfairness is likely to lead to peace. And being fair to your enemies is stupid.

It’s the job of the President to do the bidding of his country, and that means knowing your friends from your enemies.

Gorenberg has failed to make a contribution. The first thing he, among others, should do, is acknowledge that the kind of grand peace that people hope for will not happen in our lifetimes. Barring, that is, a grand and bloody victory by one side or the other. Once you see straight, you can think straight.

“I think you have to start from the position that Judaism is an ideology – a criminal ideology – with a large number of variants (religious, secular, racial, communistic, exclusivist, pseudo-universalistic,etc.) all of which have in common the postulation of a species-like distinction between supposed ‘Jews’ and other humans. The notion that this ideology is especially appealing to people with a certain heredity is unprovable, as compared to the opposed notion that it is appealing to those to whom ‘jewish heredity’
is ascribed circumstantially, on the merely sociological plane. ‘Cruor’ is by definition indemonstrable.”

Is not every “limud” begun with מילי דבדיחותא and so therefore I am that clown.