2/01/2009

As the Dust Settles

Posted by Andrew | Labels:

As the dust settles over Gaza, and the Palestinians and Israelis attempt to return to a pseudo-normal state of detente, it is soothing to step back a bit and read an optimistic op-ed examining the future. Nicholas Kristof writes this week on the future of the region and discusses the international community's hope that President Obama and the United States will re-engage in the region, taking an even-handed approach, which has been lacking for almost two decades now (arguably since Bush, Sr.).

You can find the NYT Op-Ed here.

Nonetheless, as usual, I'm more pessimistic on whole thing. Israels have an election coming up, and already each candidate is attempting to prove he has bigger eggs than the others. Olmert suggested Israeli would return to Gaza with a "severe and disproportionate response," meaning because once again the Palestinians fired a few poorly aimed rockets at Israeli cities, Israel is going to completely level three apartment buildings which may or may not contain weapons and may or may not contain 50+ civilians. Benjamin Netanyahu, the predicted upcoming prime minister of the Likud Party suggested that the war should have gone on longer, been fought harder and should have destroyed Hamas altogether. Valiant goals, except in the process of destroying Hamas, Israel would have had to kill every single civilian in the Gaza Strip

Frankly, to be blunt, I'm sick of this fighting, I'm sick of Israel claiming they are the victim, and I'm tired of electioneering politics in which candidates attempt to show how tough they are by bombing other people.

2 comments:

emilykatz said...

hi andrew... thanks for your thoughts and the op-ed piece. i just got back from israel- was there during the war. very interesting.

ps. good to see you at new years!

11:01 PM  
Bruce Kratky said...

I too am sick of the fighting. Can't we all just get along? One can not help but be pessimistic regarding the Middle East conflict that has been going on since 1949. At the same time I have to look at it from differing angels to give me better perspective. I don't have the total death toll in this conflict available to me. Since the establishment of the State of Israel, how many Jews, Muslims, neutrals have died? How many have been displaced? Not how many were born somewhere other than their parent's home land, but how many were actually, in the first person, displaced?

I have been told by many Christian missionary groups with excellent credibility that nearly two million Christians were either murdered or put in slave labor for the rest of their lives after Mao's communists came to power around the same time. I have heard that one half to one million died in South Vietnam after the war either from execution or slave labor camps in Vietnam. I know of nearly two million who died in Cambodia as the Kahmer Rouge destroyed the intellagencia of that nation. I know that over two million Chinese died in the seventies during the "Cultural Revolution". I am aware of nearly a million dead in Rwanda. There have been nearly a million dead in Darfur. There have been untold millions who have starved to death in Africa since 1949 due to political unrest, bad farming, and wars against imperial states. There have been untold millions who have died from malaria since DDT was banded because America's song birds and eagles eggs became so thin the young couldn't survive. The death toll from the post Stalin regime continued after 1953, so, since he is responsible for 30-50 million deaths from the beginning of his terror to the end, let's say another million until it stopped completely.

As for displaced persons...the numbers are beyond calculation either from political unrest or natural catastrophe.

So, where do we go with these figures? If one million have died in the wars between Israel and its neighbors..I would be surprised. Though there are a few million Palestinians now it was not millions who were displaced originally, in the first person. I came up with approximately 8 and one half million killed by war and politics since 1949 (not counting the Middle East issues) and I think that estimate is conservative. Probably ten to twenty percent more in fact. The displaced are off the charts. The death by disease, who can number them? And I am not including the AIDS catastrophe that is on going.

I would bet that numerically speaking the Middle East "CRISIS" is small potatoes. That they can't figure it out, perhaps the rest of us should just tell them to all grow up, or let them fight it out to the end (things just as bad have happened and the rest of us are here anyway), or maybe all of us should simply tell them to ALL go to hell!

Your thoughts?

6:41 AM  

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