Twilight of the Gods

What a stunning lack of imagination can produce, despite operatic staging.

Here’s the plan.

Take two million bombed out, starved and exposed people from the land they were born in, dump them somewhere else on the planet, then finish bulldozing the rubble produced by a year of carpet bombing and strategic land clearing in Gaza so the armed forces of the United States of America (seriously! American troops!) can secure the inevitable airdrop of a real estate family ready to build a seaside resort for billionaires on the graves of twenty thousand children.

This plan was cooked up by two world leaders that share a unique sort of personal and political decline. Netanyahu has been for over a decade one step away from a collapsed government, criminal prosecution, and after a year of inflicting devastating violence on a defenseless population in Gaza, has failed to get his hostages back or to defeat the armed organization currently holding those hostages.

Trump, his partner in this insane plan, already a convicted felon, squeezed out an electoral win last November by spreading racist bile and warnings of invented emergencies anywhere he could find a microphone. Now, after just two weeks in office, he’s proving too old to control the lunatics his rhetoric drew into the halls of government. Once again, chaos rules. The courts are filling up with lawsuits, and lives are upended.

The good news is that their Middle East plan, or deal, or whatever it is, has after less than a day’s airing apparently struck most observers as immoral, unworkable and contrary to what candidate Trump said about foreign policy all summer. The bad news is that a plan to bring peace and stability to the Middle East is still desperately needed.

Trump is right in asserting that doing the same thing over and over again has not brought peace to the region. What he’s wrong about is that the cause of the conflict’s persistence has not been Palestinian intransigence but Israeli refusal to consider Palestinians—literally half the population of the region under Israeli control since 1967—as people deserving the same basic human rights Jewish people enjoy on the same land under the same government. They have not even been treated as equals in years of negotiations.

The two state solution was sabotaged over and over again by the right wing of the Israeli populace. What’s needed is a fresh look. But certainly not the enactment of the once unspoken but now overt goal of the Israeli right, the removal of all Palestinians. All six million of them. A number with uncomfortable echoes. A number that may be reached incrementally by sending two million packing to make way for Jared Kushner’s dream project.

Here’s’ an alternative. An idea that gets very little consideration though it’s plainly suited to the actual facts on the ground.

Declare the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea a united sovereign nation with some agreed upon title. Then give all those living in that newly defined democratic nation full citizenship and equal rights under the law, including one person one vote. The political infrastructure is already there. The courts are already there. An appreciation for democracy is already there. At the risk of minimizing the difficulty in executing such a plan, political courage is all that is needed to prove that Palestinians are by their existence no threat to anyone. The black population in post apartheid South Africa did not rise up and slaughter the remaining white citizens. Nor did the Black population in the USA after the civil rights movement.

That abused and brutalized people become angry and often violent is no news to anyone. Remove that irritant and you find the reason why we have so many more democracies today than we did in 1948.

A grass-roots democratic swell will be needed to get this plan moving. It’s already begun on college campuses, not insignificantly by several Jewish student groups. Groups that have been slandered by Elise Stefanik, who is now the UN spokesperson for the Trump administration and will likely work in tandem with the super Christian ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee—the super Christians who invented anti-semitism and sustained it for two thousand years and drove the Jews from Spain in the 1490s into the hands of the Arabs, under which they flourished—until 1948.

People of good will in this country, and in Israel, and in the occupied territories, and in the nations surrounding this seventy-year old poorly imagined social experiment in ethnocentric democracy, will get little help from their brainwashed leaders or the lazy Western media. Just this morning Dan Senor was on CNN rehashing the same old one-sided narrative of the conflict that the American press have lapped up for decades.

There is hope. From the ashes of Gaza there can rise hope. But don’t expect anything resembling a just peace to ever permeate the thick skulls of those two old fools pictured above. They’ve ossified into cartoons of their former selves, which were dangerously and tragically cartoonish from the start. Their plan proves their irrelevance.