Making Moot Points About the Middle East

RECENTLY WAS THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF the assassination of Israeli prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who may well have been the best, and last hope for peace in the middle east. He was a liberal, who therefore wanted change. He wanted to change war into peace, by compromising with the Palestinians. The very thought of this is taboo among hawkish Israeli and American conservatives, who prefer demonstrations of strength ad intransigence. It is compromise which made modern America possible, and it is compromise which will make peace possible, if ever it is. Israel, twenty years ago, was like america, polarized, evenly divided between liberals and conservatives, but now the conservatives are in ascendance, as they may well be in America. Rabin was intensely hated by the vast right wing conspiracy, both in Israel and in its benefactor, the U.S.A., and two brothers, only one of whom is still locked up, gunned him down. If you seek to make peace in these places, you do so at great risk. Consider Joshua Ben Joseph, Martin Luther King, and Robert F. Kennedy. Isn't there any better way to deal with these wimpish, peace loving, left wing radicals? It could be argued that the state of Israel should not exist, that 1948 was far too late in history to carve out a new nation in an ancient land, that Palestine was far happier, for both Jews and Arabs, before the fulfillment of Zionism, and that a single book, such as the Christian bible, is no excuse for the theft of a nation. Such arguments are moot. Perhaps the situation might have been better if the British Empire and the United States had not imposed the Jewish homeland upon the world without permission. Equally arguable is the proposition that the world would now be better off without the stain of European and American imperialism. Such arguments are, quite obviously, now moot.