1. Followups

Bird’s Eye: Using some of last week’s pieces, I put together a perspective on what I see happening with Israel. Fell free to disagree, of course. The Guardian looks at Israel’s building a security fence, regular correspondent (sometime reader) Linda alerted me to “Thrive” a movie about conspiracies controlling your life (or not). And a great Titanic line that demanded inclusion rounds it all off.

* Losing the Struggle Peter Marmorek

Uri Avnery says that G_d asked Israel when it was born in 1947 what it wanted to be, and Israel answered that it wanted to be Jewish, democratic, and stretch from sea to sea (Mediterranean to Jordan). G_d thought about this, and said that Israel could have any two of those, but not all three. There was a time, maybe up until recently, when Israel could have settled for democratic and Jewish, and taken the ‘67 borders, and allowed Palestine to be a separate country. But that time has passed. Now the Jewish settlers own so much land in Palestine and use so much of the water in Palestine that it is no longer possible to create any real Palestinian state. “Real” means a contiguous state with enough power to satisfy the Palestinian people. Nor is it possible to pull the settlers out of Palestine, as the power in the Israeli parliament depends on rightwing support. But leaving the settlers there without Israeli protection is also impossible, politically. So Israel will stretch from sea to sea, and now must choose between democratic or Jewish.

…There are reasons why this has happened, both because of Israeli and Palestinian intransigence, and because of unwillingness to settle for less than they wanted on both sides. And at this point the reasons why we have gotten to this point don’t matter. In the realistic world of politics there are only two questions that matter: where are we now, and where do we go from here. So, where are we?

* Israel Extends New Border Fence But Critics Say It Is A Sign Of Weakness  Harriet Sherwood The Guardian

It cuts a steel swath through the stark wilderness where Israel and Egypt meet, glinting in the desert sun as it snakes across barren hills and sandy plateaus. Wielding blowtorches at the base of the five-metre-high (16ft) barrier are some of the very men the border fence is in part designed to keep out: illegal immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa, now working as cheap construction labour for Israeli contractors.

Israel’s newest frontier fence is being erected at high speed along the 150-mile boundary between the Sinai and Negev deserts. Its construction, due to be completed by the end of this year, was accelerated after last summer’s cross-border attack in which eight Israelis were killed, and amid rising alarm about the number of refugees crossing into the Jewish state.

Once it is finished, Israel will be almost completely enclosed by steel, barbed wire and concrete, leaving only the southern border with Jordan between the Dead and Red Seas without a physical barrier. That, too, may be fenced in the future.

* “Thrive” Debunked (Thanks, Linda)

Thrive promotes conspiracy theories that are based on an imaginary division between “us” and “them.”  “We” are many and well-meaning but victimized; while “they” are a tiny, greedy and immensely powerful few who are masterfully organized, who are purposefully causing massive disasters in order to cull the population, and who will do absolutely anything in their quest to achieve total world domination.  I think the allure of this way of thinking is that it distracts and absolves us from the troubling truth that the real source of the problem is in all of us, and in the economic systems we have collectively produced.  As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every heart”

* Titanic Cleverness (via Reddit)

I renamed my iPod ‘The Titanic’ so that when I plug it in, iTunes tells me “The Titanic is syncing.” That is all.