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Unpopular Ideas

Ramblings and Digressions from out of left field, and beyond....

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Location: Piedmont of Virginia, United States

All human history, and just about everything else as well, consists of a never-ending struggle against ignorance.

Tuesday, January 06, 2009

What Should Be Done About Gaza?

That question is easy to answer. The walls sealing off Israel should be torn down. Hamas should melt down their rockets. The checkpoints should be disassembled and carted away. The suicide bombers should be reminded of the first part of Patton's key dictum about such matters, namely that "nobody ever won a war by dying for their country," but not the second part, which went, "they won the war by making the other poor, dumb son of a bitch die for his country." Everybody, especially the "settlers" in a land already settled for millennia, should go back home. Jerusalem should be turned into an international peace park, while the whole of the Gaza Strip should be converted to a deer park, and Israelis and Muslims should give agnosticism a better look.

We can confidently predict that none of this will be done any time soon, and instead the murder and mayhem will go on for generations more, with the picture in Gaza and thereabouts remaining nearly the same at the end of your children's long lives as it does now for anybody who came of age in the late 1940's, when all of this started (unless it already did in Samson's time).

In comment sections to almost any article about the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, you will find people who apparently think the situation is just lovely, as shown by how they scornfully dismiss those who have never been to Israel and Gaza, arguing that without that experience, no one can know what it's really like over there and so should never dare to say anything about it.

But my question always is, "What is there to know?"

Are they saying that If I were to suddenly go bonkers and therefore go there, I wouldn't find a big ghetto with many thousands of people crammed into a very small space, from which rockets are regularly and clumsily fired and into which other rockets are regularly and somewhat more precisely fired and keeping the whole place in a constant shambles of wreckage, blood, and tears?

This is such a huge globe, with nothing much going on on almost all of it, and to think that contesting one of the smallest of fly specks on it with the utmost fury is all that a large number of people can find to do with themselves!

1 Comments:

Blogger LeftLeaningLady said...

I do love your idea about what to do with Gaza, now if we could just convince others.

I was not born until '67 and no matter how much reading I do on this subject, it is still confusing. I don't understand WHY Israel was allowed to form and I don't understand WHY they are so pissed off all the time. I understand why the Palestinians are pissed off.

10:33 AM  

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