For a stuffed shirt, he's pretty polarizing

the junior senator from illinois, Mr. Barack Obama, keeps coming up in some of the periodicals. why does a man who has nearly no position on anything stir so much ire in the public?

i imagine some of the reason is that people keep spreading around rumors about him. people are also spreading rumors about rumors they may have heard among a large target audience that they commune with regularly, such as this op-ed from the NYTimes sent to me by The Bunny.

to sum up (probably pretty poorly), Mr. Friedman here is talking about how the US, based on remarks made by President Bush over the past two years, is already pointed towards the two-state solution in Israel. due to this, whomever is our president next january has their work on the matter cut out for them. he continues, stating that a president that is good for America is good for Israel, since their prowess in the Middle East depends on our strength. then he blames President Bush for faltering in Iraq, not forseeing the incredible rise in the price of crude oil, and being the reason that Iran hates Israel.

ok....

first of all, everyone keeps coming up with this "two-state solution," but it just isn't going to happen peacefully. it's like having "winning the lottery" as your retirement plan. could it happen? sure. it could happen after a big war with tons of casualties. or it could happen after a few decades of glacial peace talks, but both sides would see it as a concession.  

so, maybe we can figure out a way for peace to actually mean unity. well, the biggest hurdle to get over is that, by and large, neither the jews NOR the palestinians (according to a recent Economist yougov poll) would ever, ever be willing to work towards a solution where both nations lived under the same plutocratic burocracy, just like the rest of us chumps in the world. i mean c'mon, if the north and south of the US can do it...?

there is still a pretty solid understanding that Palestinians don't just want to return to their homes and have visas to leave the country and be regular citizens and not get their houses crushed and all that stuff; they want to come back and take over and crush the jews.

it's not just bad marketing, it's a freakin' total ideological disconnect. no one wants peace, they just want to win. it's like old school northern ireland. but all it took for that situation to turn around was a few hundred years and a total resurgence of a diversified Irish economy (which, granted, has started to slip in the past couple of quarters, but nobody's blowing up cafes just yet.) is coming back under ANY peaceful (albeit subjugative) means all that unacceptable? you know where these Palestinians are holed up right now? freakin' Lebanon and Egypt and Syria and whatnot. holy crap! i would personally work towards any peace agreement i could get my hands on if my next option was living in Lebanon. talk about out of the frying pan and into the foxhole.

so now Abbas is threatening to quit if they cant reach a peace agreement by 2009? what kind of a dumb-ass threat is that? who the hell is that hurting? the Israelies are going to have less and less support from the US as this shit drags on, especially after the election. so now is not the time to start showing your ass. 

the Israeli government should be considered an occupier. and there are only two known solutions for ridding yourself of an occupier: 1) crush them through military force (yours or someone else's) and then have an awful power vaccum; or 2) become a part of their society and wait for a stronger middle class to fuel internal liberation (these days, as said, this is done economically). so, the palestinians should take what they can get and work on building up their economic stability and backing as a people. that's where everything is won and lost these days.

the "heroic opportunity" that Israel should be looking for is completely accepting Palestinians into Israel, and giving them all the rights as citizens. and the "heroic opportunity" that Palestinians should be working for is to move back to where they are from under whatever peaceful circumstatnces they can. i know it sucks, and i know i can say whatever i want because i have wide oceans and weak neighbors and 230 years of (relatively) the same governmental system, and i know it's easy to bet against the underdogs and tell them it's time to to pack it in. but you know what? peace starts with peace.