On Earth Peace to a Middle East of Good Will?

January 4, 2009

by George Thomas

This will prove to be a rare view: I’m tired of the violence between Israelis and Palestinians.

Oh, wait! This just in! Lots of others share this view! What a surprise.

Since the Yom Kippur War in 1967, the cyclical news coming from Israel and/or Palestine and/or neighboring spectator and/or participant-observer states, non-states and “rogue” entities, might lead one to think we like this sort of thing. The arguments? We all know the arguments. We’re growing concerned over the arguments, many experiencing the urge to jump up and run to the Victrola to reset the needle on the broken record.

The record is dismal. Everyone concerned apparently believes that predictability and an honest fix are possible, if only those pesky “others” would quit their shenanigans.

The Jewish state in Israel was a product of necessary humanitarian aid to a ravaged population following the Nazi insanity. Today Palestinians and others who were displaced are driven by a combination of family memory and ideology, to the point where it becomes an unapproachable position beyond the reach of debate. Displaced Palestinian families maintain generations-long grudges against people who moved them from their homes. On the Israeli side there is a sense of legal entitlement to the territory carved out for them after World War II; yet given ideologically-driven, quasi-military operations against them, their initial righteous indignation and rage has become focused against the old residents.

The much-ballyhooed desire by Iranians, Hamas, etc. to wipe the Jewish state and people off the map, not to mention much Israeli sentiment in return, is reminiscent of Nazi madness, which held that it’s possible to engage in genocide without consequences.
When all sides adopt the basic premise that the others made unfortunate choices of parents and heritage, the situation can’t be resolved.

It all started in much the same way as it did for many others, back when xenophobes possessed alternatives to genocide. People were driven out or forcibly removed from their land with the result being a “diaspora.” These are tough issues to get around in modern times because of real estate limitations and circumstances. The Roma, Sinti or Gypsies are a perfect case in point, having never been gifted any real estate anywhere through millennia of drifting from regions near India, where their ancestors originated. Some even alight in the United States. Blacks and Indians claim some kind of diaspora, and I believe certain Celtic people were displaced and persecuted in Britain along about 800 AD – an era which my family long ago either blocked or forgot, particularly after surviving the escape to America and their later preoccupations with slamming the poor and supporting Tories from George McClellan (who lost to Lincoln in 1864) through the Coolidge, Hoover and Roosevelt administrations. You see, sometimes diasporas build character and strength among the suffering. All-American, that!

But enough of this boring personal stuff. How dare I presume to suffer as others have suffered! It’s time for something NEW! Some hypothetical solutions! …. Oops, scratch that. No “final solutions.” Those are the problem.

Hypothesis #1: Suppose for the sake of argument, class, that there is a proximity factor at work. Perhaps the US’s current descent into irreconcilable political camps has been delayed until comparatively recently because normal, Middle Eastern xenophobia had to pass through the Pipes of History past the cholesterol-plaque deposits left by historical modification, millennia of philosophers, far-away wars involving new states and religion, case after case of angry, fed-up people fleeing one thing or another from wherever to anywhere, all moving, always away from the Fertile Crescent, where all the loudest ideological hollering still centers. In other words, humanity has been saddled with snotty, holier-than-thou Euro-democracies in direct proportion to distance from that center. What were people fleeing from? Not always some Draconian government or guillotine-happy potentate. Most of the time people fled anyone with whom they disagreed over anything. Only recently have those ideological divides begun eating away at the USA.

What a simple-minded hypothesis! It’s so much like the one from the ’80s through the ‘90s, adopted by the Bushies, holding that democracies don’t go to war with each other. Seriously! That’s been a part of political science “scholarship” for a long time, it’s been debunked in so many ways, and it was adopted wholesale by Bush advisers. Anyway, I still like my hypothesis better than Huntington’s popular clash of civilizations.

Assuming that one fell flat, let’s try Hypothesis 2: We know that all sides in the Israeli-Palestinian trouble claim grievances. We also know that all sides are mucked up by ideological intransigence. As a historian friend put it, the body of practical “fixes” for the troubles includes truly wonderful ideas from public-spirited world citizens and diplomats, full of wisdom from centuries of municipal and state governance, full of public works savvy worthy of any Department of Sewer-Fixing, lawn-water and lights in any Rockwellian city or town. They would have been adopted long ago if any of the Israeli or Palestinian leaders were people of good will.

I’m reminded of the clash of denominations (Huntington fans hold yer horses!) in my home town, with one church gushing every December solstice time of intense commercialism and obligatory worship, “…and on earth peace and good will toward men;” while the other congregation was led through, “…and on earth peace to men of good will.” Clearly, even proper American stuffed-shirts and pillars of the community haven’t really learned the lesson that wishing the other guys with those other customs, heritage, incorrect parents and presumably bad will, would die off – and then doing something about it – usually results in gruesome consequences.

I propose that the Obama administration send in Dr. Phil to wise these folks up. Dr. Phil might initiate a “tough love” approach to Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy. He’ll look them all in the eye and declare that they are “simply not men and women of good will.” That’ll l’arn ‘em.

Failing that measure, what would we lose? At worst, the Dr. Phil Hypothesis will prove ill-advised and the region will dissolve into war.

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Letter to the Editor: Good Cars need Good Teams - by R. A. Letcher, PhD

Good cars need good teams -- designers, engineers, line workers… and learning-oriented managers by Robert A. Letcher, PhD [Author’s note: I submitted the following as a letter to the editor of The New York Times, after that paper carried an article under the headline, "To Fix Detroit, Obama Is Said to Drop Plan for ‘Car Czar’", 02/15/2009.] It is widely accepted that you can't win a horse race without a good horse. Of course, it helps to have a lot of money and a good plan for spending it. But, you still need a good horse. The authors reminded me of this when they wrote: “The companies’ plans are required to show progress in cutting long-term costs as a condition for keeping their loans.” I doubt GM and Chrysler can win this most important "automobile race" merely by having better accountants and more muscular negotiators: they still need a good "horse". That means the companies will have to show that their teams can still design and build cars that people are drawn to buy and willing to pay for: winners. I doubt they can. The problem isn't that they didn't know how to; it's that they don't know how to break out of the group-think that ensnarled them, their managers, their whole organizations, decades ago. I would be more optimistic, had the government also required the companies to include plans for transforming themselves into learning organizations. Aye, there’s the rub: learning entails risk-taking, not “yes people”.
Bob's Bail Out Plan by bobl-tlm
Fiscal Therapy - Getting the economy back on its feet, giving taxpayers a break, saving your retirement fund and your kid's college tuition? Done. And it won't cost you a penny.

For years now, whenever I've been invited to lecture students on how our tax system works, I have asked a simple question: What is the purpose of the United States of America? The most common answer, be it at prestigious universities, elite prep schools, rural community colleges, or crowded urban high schools, is this: To make people rich. This should come as no great surprise. For anyone born after, say, 1970, the world has been shaped by Ronald Reagan's remaking of government's relationship with private interests—a vision of lower taxes, less regulation, and maximum economic leeway for those at the top. In this view, the pursuit of wealth is the warp and weft of America; everything else will follow. By contrast, the preamble to the Constitution tells us the nation's reason for being in 52 words that can be reduced to six principles: society, justice, peace, security, commonwealth, and freedom. Individual riches don't make the list. They are a product of American society, not its guiding purpose. Progress, then, must begin with a return to the best of the values that created this Second American Republic—one born, it's worth remembering, from the failure of the Articles of Confederation, whose principles (weak government, unfettered capitalism) found their resurrection in the economic policies of the past three decades.
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