The other night I sat down for the first time with a new friend who happened to be Jewish, and happened to have a Ph.D. In the normal course of things it seemed she wanted to make sure I was safe to be with. Finally her anxiety got the best of her. She interrupted me while I was talking about the weather or something to blurt out: "well I think Israel has a right to exist." That was Shelley's world in a grain of sand all right. No one in America challenges Israeli's right to exist but still Jews, even Ph.Ds, have their fears, and perhaps are even entitled to be terrified by them.
The fact is, though, that when John Miller trekked for days through the hills of Afghanistan back in 1989 to get the only American interview with Osama Bin Laden the first words out of his mouth were about American support for Israel. And true to form, in his 2004 pre-election bombshell it was much the same way. But oddly there never has been any debate here about our involvement with Israel?
Liberals love to challenge all of our foreign policy adventures mostly because they don't like us much and accordingly don't like our foreign policy much either. 9/11 came and went as a direct consequence of our support for Israel but the liberals didn't say one single word. Conservatives said nothing too, although that can be explained at least in part because many of them support a nutty "end of times" bloody fantasy, taken very loosely from the Book of Revelation, which anticipates the death or conversion of Jews once the jews are in place in the Holy Land, and the "end of times" armageddon finally begins.
So where did this the most deafening silence in American history come from? It comes quite simply from our guilt over the holocaust, which we apparently feel quite uniquely among nations. Probably it is testimony to the unique goodness in our souls. Nevertheless, our foreign policy should be rationale; not something that quietly and haphazardly evolved while JFK was busy with the USSR and LBJ was busy with Vietnam, and then is allowed to metastasize into World War 3.
Rather than blind dumb support for Israeli's war against Palestine we should offer peace to the world and most importantly to ourselves. We should reassemble the UN coalition that gave Israel to the Jews and demand that they built and defend an impregnable international wall of peace at the '67 or '73 Israeli borders. If they fail to participate we can do it ourselves and then demand that the world shut up forever having failed to offer anything themselves except, perhaps, a road map to World War 3. Such a wall would say to the Israeli and Palestinian combatants that this is the solution on which the world as agreed; the world will defend it to the death, we don't want your stupid little squabble destroying the planet; deal with it! 50 years of "road map" type peace solutions ought to be more than enough as we sit on the brink of World War 3.
You have to wonder, though, whether Bin Laden, 9/11, our guilt over the holocaust, Israel's legitimate and paranoid need for security, their not so secret desire to steal the West Bank, Bushs desire not to participate in a Clintonesque peace initiative, Iraq, the "end of times" crazies, Palestinian intransigence, Arab Nationialism, and US blindness, will all conspire to create World War 3 out of a simple little spat between two little combatants similar to the way WWW1 was created out of a tiny little spat in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 between the Serbs and Austro-Hungarians.
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