The Holy Land

The President's speech on Thursday, in Cairo, has increased the spin in the commentariat.  I would say, all-in-all, it did the job the President wanted it to do.  Now the question is, was that enough.

I liked the fact that he made plain that the Holocaust happened.  Denial is not helping things.  The more Iran denies it the more paranoid the people in Israel will become.  The real problem there is that when you have enemies, it isn't really paranoia.

Are we ever going to get a solution to that problem?  Will we have peace?  Will there be space for Israel to exist alongside its Arab neighbors, in peace, free from the random bombings and rocket attacks it now endures?  Will the Palestinians find a homeland and a chance to become a people with the ability to choose their own future?  Is Gaza not a virtual prison, with Israel controlling all entry and exit, including all imports?

Then there is the question, do the Arabs need Israel as an issue. Somewhere I saw where someone attributed that idea to one of his professors, a P J Vatikotis.  (Can you believe it, someone who didn't make it into Wikipedia?)  The same person who raised the issue of if the Arabs need Israel as a focus of their attention also pointed out that the Arabs cite the Crusader States and how it took the Arabs 200 years to make them go away, but eventually they did.  Memories go back a long way in that neighborhood.  If the Arab mentality is that this will take 200 years to fix, but in the end Israel will go away, then thoughts of "peace" are probably misplaced.

As Clausewitz points out, the Defender, in a way, is always responsible for the war.  The Defender could have just given in to the demands of the Aggressor.  And, if those who went before us had developed a national concensus to allow for Jewish immigration out of Germany in the 1930s, before the Holocaust took off, then we might not have this problem today.  But, that was a different era and a time with different concerns.  I can just hear people in 1938 saying that Germans surely wouldn't kill millions of Jews, just because they are Jewish, would they?

President Obama is trying a new approach to this area, one different from that of his predecessors.  I hope he has better luck than they did.

Regards  —  Cliff