The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle
Commentary on the Flux of Events
Anti-Israeli / Pro-Palestinian propaganda is kicking in with remarkable potency here in upstate New York. Out for dinner last night, the day that the bombings of Afganistan began, a good friend of the female persuasion offered the standard argument that our conflict with world terrorism boiled down to America's slavishly uncritical support of Israel and the consequent oppression of the Palestinian people. Why the propaganda is effective, I shall try to address presently.
The Palestinians deserve a homeland, she said.
Perhaps they do, I said, but the catch is that the Palestinian leadership will accept nothing less than all the territory occupied by the state of Israel -- meaning, not only do the Palestinians want a homeland, but they want it to be in exactly the same space occupied by Israel, and since the laws of physics declare that two entities cannot occupy the same place at the same time, this problem has no realistic solution.
This was how the Oslo negotiations finally concluded (and fell apart). The Israeli government under Ehud Barak had negotiated for more than a year in good faith, and offered enormous consessions in real estate to the Palestinans. But in the end, forces within the Palestinian command decided that nothing less than the elimination of the state of Israel itself would do.
Of course this outcome was extremely unfortunate. By the 1980s, the Palestinian people had been integrating successfuly into the Israeli economy. Actual Palestniian citizens of Israel (and there are plenty) enjoyed civil rights greater than individuals in any Muslim nation. Conditions were approaching a point at which one could at least imagine both Muslims and Jews living peacefully in the territory that is the sovereign nation called Israel. Two things happened to scuttle that possibility. One was the Palestinian population bomb -- and extraordinary high birth-rate in the poorest of the Palestinian territories, Gaza in particular -- which has now produced a very large cohort of young men, high on testosterone, with no employment, and poor prospects, who are easily provoked to rage and reckless action by more seasoned professional extremists.
The second element is the remarkable availability of small arms to even the poorest people of the world. Five teenagers armed with AK-47s and a half dozen grenades can create world-class mayhem. And the various networks of muslim extremists and terrorists (and governments!) have done an excellent job in supplying these small arms liberally among the most hopeless classes of west and central Asia. The result, in its most complete form, is the kind of anarchy-by-attrition that we have now seen in a dozen or so third-world countries, from Liberia to Somalia to Afghanistan: the last gang left standing becomes the "government." This is what give the world monsters like Charles Taylor of Liberia, who employed 11-year-old foot soldiers and kept them high on marijuana as they shot up civilian villages and city neighborhoods in Monrovia for the sheer fun of it (kids enjoy playing "war.") This is what gave the world the monstrous Taliban regime. It was all predicted, by the way, with stunning accuracy by Robert Kaplan in his several books about global politics, especially The Coming Anarchy.
Now, why is it that Americans of the educated classes, with many Jewish friends, are suddenly expressing so much sympathy for the Palestinian cause (the desire for a homeland)? My impression is that they weren't paying attention to the Oslo process that took place over the last several years. The lady at our dinner table last night seemed surprised to hear that the Palestinians will settle for nothing less than Israel vacating all the land currently within its borders and handing it over to the Palestinians. But this is the truth of where things stand. And it is not going to happen.