[LEMONS] 12.04.2001
When I walked into N.'s on Saturday, he was distraught, watching the news coming out of Israel. "This is really bad," he said. "A whole bunch of innocent people are getting killed." He went on to say that the only way to stop the violence was for the US to intervene. Yesterday morning, I fired up the electronet to start my day, and said Good Morning to my friend K., who lives in New Jersey. He replied that it was a horrible morning, also citing the violence in Israel. K. didn't even want to discuss it, telling me that his views would piss me off. I got somewhat the same sense from N. N. is Palestinian, K. is Jewish. Both of them have much stronger feelings about Israel and Palestine than an Alabama Goy like me will ever muster.
This is a situation where I'm uncomfortable picking sides, like when two of your friends are arguing. You feel both sides are wrong, and you just wish they'd work it out. I haven't really worked out what I think should be done. Or what could be done. So in lieu of that, I'm just going to talk about my feelings on the region.
As a kid, I had a pretty straight up interpretation events: Israel good, Palestine bad. Some of this stemmed from a trip we took to Israel when I was a kid. We traveled over from Iran. While we were there, a bomb went off, and we spent the rest of our vacation watching tanks roll down the street and planes criss-cross the sky. We were told by a local that Israel would have a strong response; that Israel always had a strong response in order to keep from being destroyed by its neighbors.
My views didn't change too much over the years because, quite honestly, I never gave it much thought. Until I went to Kuwait. In Kuwait, three of the guys I worked closely with were Palestinian. One of them, Mohammed, was a hell of a guy, and we became friends. It was from Mohammed that I heard, for the first time, the plight of Palestinians abroad. I didn't realize what it meant to be a landless people until then. But it was a guy named Osama who got my attention.
Osama and I were working together, alone, on the day a truck, loaded with ammunition, blew up at the US Army base several miles away. At the time, we had no idea what it was. This was just after the Gulf War had ended, and there were daily rumors that Saddam was coming back in again. All we knew was that we were sitting down at two desks, doing paperwork, when we heard a massive explosion that blew both the doors shut. We were used to explosions, you heard them every day. But not on this scale. It was immediately followed by a series of smaller explosions at irregular intervals.
He freaked. I mean, he completely lost it. He talked about how he'd suffered through two invasions, first the Iraqis than the Americans. How he feared that his daughters would be killed by falling bombs. How he couldn't go anywhere because he was Palestinian, and he didn't know what to do, but that he was getting out. And with that, he jumped in his truck and drove off, leaving me alone. Osama, this Osama (which he told me meant sword), was just a guy with a 9 to 5 trying to lead a normal life. I felt awful for him, and for all of those in his situation. He was better educated that most of the Kuwaitis I met, but he would never have the opportunities they did, because he was Palestinian. It was fucked up.
Just a few months later, I was in college. One of my best friends there was a guy named Eddie. The year before, he had taken a trip to Israel with several friends of his from high school. They went to the beach, and while they were there one of his friends, a girl not even eighteen, was killed by a Palestinian bomb. He wound up with gore all over him. How do you justify that? How can you call that a pursuit of freedom?
Both sides are horribly wrong. Both sides are engaging in the murder of innocents, both sides continue are, quite literally, baby killers. And both think that the other side is out to completely destroy them, to wipe them off of the face of the Earth.
But the fact of the matter is that most people on both sides are just plain folks who want to work and live and go about their business without worrying about suicide bombers or Armed helicopters.
So it's up to us. It's up to people like you and me to force a peace agreement. I don't know how that happens. Yet again, this seems to me like a good argument for global government. Nations are antiquated, and lead only to divisions and violence. As long as nations exist, we live with war.
- l i n k -
