Land of Confusion: Israel

Building on the idea that Israel needs to control more of its own destiny, the country needs to realize it is going through profound changes at a time of three competing powers attempting to exert their influence upon the whole of the Middle East.

Israel, against the stereotypes of many, is beholden to American influence in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia and Iran are now rising powers in the region, involving a Saudi backlash to an Iranian insurgence in the wake of the American invasion of Iraq.

Israel has been resigned to a position of proxy in the eyes of Arab states, and confidence in its own military's ability to execute has lowered for most Israelis. The country is extremely tense and depressed because of its Prime Minister's ability to disappoint an increasingly disillusioned public. More so than a war being characterized by poor decisions, the onslaught of corruption scandals and the ability of the corrupt to get away with their improprieties is gashing the collective surface of Israeli society's skin.

But there is a cap on a pressured euphoria. The disillusionment with alternative agendas, thanks to the corruption and inhibitions of Kadima's leadership and the failed venture of the Gaza Disengagement, have Israelis thinking more conservatively.

The ultra-left Peace Now organization criticized Thursday's Tel Aviv demonstrations as lacking an alternative solution to the state's ills, rather than a simple demand for Ehud Olmert to step down. The movement is taking an unusually misplaced stance on the political upheaval, trying to defend Ehud Olmert and his government's deserving to stay in government.

Peace Now fears the support for withdrawing from the West Bank is waning. The reality is Peace Now is only joining a chorus made up of current government ministers and Kadima parliamentarians who are committing political suicide by attempting to save Ehud Olmert.

When Olmert resigns, the euphoria that will have been uncorked will provide Israelis with an opportunity to install a practical vision for Israel's future into power. The sad thing is there is no profound party, nor candidate, waiting for the votes to implement this installation.

Israel's foreign and domestic policies are intertwined. All countries' are in this region. Control over the environment is essential to counter both Saudi and Iranian influence in the Middle East, and to begin handling the mounting crisis of the Iraqi refugees flooding Israel's neighbors.

With a solid control over the West Bank, Israel can control a massive reconstruction program that would put the keys back into the Israeli drivers' hands. Being forced into an arbitrary withdrawal from the West Bank before security can be guaranteed for Israel is an impossible scenario. Israel would be in need to resolve itself to fighting more wars with a new and unstable state on its borders.

Throughout the peace process, Palestinian autonomy has been emphasized over Israeli security. The reality is that Palestinian autonomy is unsustainable without Israeli security, for whose lack of it would force Israel into new armed conflicts with Palestinian militias and rocket squads.

Israel's strongest asset is its economy, having grown in spite of a major war that threatened a third of the state last summer. Considering this, Israel's economic clout is essential to maintaining a peace with the Palestinians of the West Bank (and Gaza).

A focused campaign of Israeli-monitored reconstruction would enable Palestinians to jump-start their economy, and at the same time be intertwined with the Israeli investment into its rise. Economic interdependence would create a mutual incentive to avoid war, and provide Israel with the financial and physical security necessary to allow Palestinians more openness.

Additionally, Israel's planned expansion into other regions of the country should enable it incentives for further environmental and technological research and development. This R&D will invite a new resurgence in scientific study in the country and a more active international element in the slew of studies the research programs at institutions like Ben Gurion University and the Weizmann Institute would conduct.

Israel's numbers necessitate the creation of stronger financial networks throughout the region to enable itself to gain more in terms of resources, particularly water.

The country essentially needs a leadership that can consider all these factors and provide Israel with the ability to foster as a regional influence. Israel needs to consider its ability to develop better relationships with its Arab neighbors for future years, and in order to create investments and interests for itself in its immediate neighbors, particularly Jordan, Egypt and the West Bank.

It must become a state that enables all its citizens to contribute to the state's growth, at the same maintaining its integrity as a Jewish state. This can be done without a problem, and it need not exacerbate already prevalent sectarian overtones in Israeli society. Avoiding the trap of restriction is vital to Israel's ability to break the necessity to capitulate to problematic compromises which may itself hurt Israel's own ability to grow.

If Israel Controlled its own Destiny, there'd be Peace in the ME

The senseless, belligerent and reckless forced peace process that the world is trying to shove down Israel's throat right now will only backfire. Years of half-hearted initiatives and half-assed security arrangements are literally blowing up in everyone's faces. The United States, Israel's most dependable ally, is failing in every way to grasp the reality of the situation between Israel and the Palestinians.

There is no conceivable way to force either the Israelis, nor the Palestinians, into a reckless, unstable and doomed-to-fail peace process right now.

The reason everyone thinks the international community is pushing for this now is to counter Iran. The logic is that if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is solved, the Palestinians would not be able to fall into Iran's sphere of influence, plus militant groups would have to disarm.

This is a ridiculous assumption. Firstly, Hizbullah is first beyond all else a Lebanese political party. The political benefits it received after instigating last summer's war with Israel were immense - even though it could be argued they squandered them with the last few months of power-grabbing in Lebanon. Hizbullah uses Israel as its reason for being, and persists with the myth of the Israeli threat to maintain its weapons arsenals, all the while ignoring the idea of handing complete military autonomy and monopoly over to the Lebanese army like in a normal one-military country.

Secondly, Hamas is just as concerned with power. The gun battles with Fatah are over more than relations with Israel. It also is unique in that it is a religious nationalist movement. Its reason of being would be the creation of an Islamesque state in the West Bank and Gaza. Hamas is also a political party, just as much as Hizbullah. It will not disarm.

Thirdly, that is not the reason. The real real is that the international community thinks there is a balance of force. Remember the logic that pushed the United States and Soviet Union to make arms reduction agreements in the 70s. The idea was they were evenly matched powers that could not win a war against the other. That is the idea here. It is based on a myth, that the Israeli military is weak.

This misperception of weakness makes it appear to the Arab World that Israel is vulnerable. It is not. Using the wrong war plan is not a sign that there is a paper tiger in the Middle East.

Israel has allowed the United States to set a lot in terms of the boundaries of the game. The reality is that Israel would incur no benefit from Palestinian independence right now. The West Bank is an economic disaster, while there are no words to describe Gaza. Militarization and anti-Israeli sentiment is too ingrained in Palestinian society for the Israelis to trust a Palestinian state, nor have the will to extend full independence to one after the failure of the Oslo Accords.

The two sides are again on the verge of war. The second Gaza war in one year could be just days away. How could anyone speak of a final peace treaty in such a hostile environment?

Israel has been under siege since its inception, and the virtually unconditional withdrawal from the West Bank plus the uprooting of 80,000 Jewish settlers, would be a horribly encouraging precedent to anti-Israel terrorist organizations and states. Creating a smaller playing field for itself by giving away more land so hastily and so recklessly will only force Israel to strengthen its military and have to act against outside threats with a more limited scope of options.

A peace process at this juncture will only make matters worse. Remember, the lack of an independent Palestinian state is not causing the violence, it is the lack of Israeli security that got the Israelis to hold their ground in the West Bank in the first place.

Should the US Accept Iraqi Refugees?

Umm, yeah.

The Iraqi refugee crisis, which my independent study paper is about (and I am kind of not paying attention to) right now has finally been getting a lot more attention in the media. Over 2 million Iraqis have fled the country, mostly from the Baghdad area. Another 2 million are "internally displaced," meaning they have fled there homes but are still within Iraq's borders.

Jordan and Syria are hosting nearly 1 million refugees each - EACH. Neither country really has the capacity to support this sudden surge in population, nor do they want to. They have the support of the UN High Commission on Refugees, but are not getting an amount of international support satisfactory enough to keep their countries from experiencing major supply shortages, inflation and potential civil conflicts.

The United States has been badgered by different countries and international organizations granting less than 1,000 refugees asylum in the last four years, even though it is primarily responsible for the crisis.

The US has plenty of reason not to be so open to so many new arrivals like it has been in the past. After the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, and several other crises, the US let in thousands of refugees. Following the fall of Saigon, the US let in well over 100,000 Vietnamese asylum seekers, nearly all of whom have been absorbed and are full American citizens.

The issues with Iraqis extend to the American fear of domestic terrorism. It would be a "nightmare" as one official put it, to have to screen tens of thousands of applicants. This fear is extended to the majority of refugees, who affiliate Muslim and are Arab.

But the two major Muslim communities are not the only groups experiencing displacement. Hundreds of thousands of refugees are thought to be Christians, plus tens of thousands of Mandeans - an ethno-religious minority whose very existence may be on the line.

Both of these communities have been particularly targeted by both Sunni and Shiite radicals - Mandeans in southern Iraq, Christians in Baghdad and northern Iraq.

Additionally, there are believed to be several thousand displaced Kurds who have not fled to Iraqi Kurdistan but attempted to go to Jordan or Syria.

While the Iraqi Civil War's main actors are Arab Sunnis and Arab Shiites, the Christians, Mandeans and Kurds all have largely stayed away from reprisals, militia organization and instigation. Their numbers are huge, they need help, and they would *perceivably* present less of a security risk to the United States.

Given these facts, it would be in the best interest of the United States to extend its hand to these particular groups, who do not have anti-American militias bloodying Baghdad, affiliated to their respective groups. It would also provide an outlet for the survival of Assyrian Christian and Iraqi Mandean cultures and societies in the wake of such a major threat to each one's existence.

The absorption of any segment of the refugees currently living in Syria or Jordan would be a vast relief to each state and better enable either one to improve the living conditions of each of those countries' refugee populations.

The Kids Aren't Alright

No one ever thinks about the reality that persists around them when they are listening to music. So often the music we listen to is completely devoid of
relatable messages we tune out, inadvertently, the messages that those few diamonds send to us. These jewels could be from any genre, written at any time in history and with any tolerable rhythm.

A few years ago, the Offspring put out a song called “The Kids Aren’t Alright.” If anyone missed the motivation behind writing a song like that, and they have heard the song before, their attention was probably elsewhere when it came on the radio. Its theme is too obvious and too pertinent to listeners to be ignored.

It talks about those times when the singer was younger, when all the kids on his “whole damn street was gonna make it big” in every way. But so quickly it starts singing about all those kids’ lives slowly then surely falling apart. References in the video to joblessness, hopelessness, drugs, premature death and suicide quickly make for an eerie and ironic theme that has an upbeat Alternative rhythm and the saddest lyrics such a band could incorporate in its music.

But do we ever think about those songs to the point that we allow them to resonate with us. How is something like this, a seven-year-old ballad from the last throws of the golden 90s age of music, going to hit me so hard when none of this has ever happened to me?

It probably has happened to you, and just as you tuned out the lyrics of this lamentation, you have tuned out all those stories about those kids from high school that some people did not quite get or suddenly dropped out of class. Beneath the piles of homework and college applications, plus eventually the new life at your university itself, lies a past dotted with tragedies that you have simply put out of your mind.

Eventually they catch up with you. The rumors begins to circulate about that friend you lost touch with from high school. You wonder what might be going on and you shallowly try once to call him, or sent a quick email asking how her life is going. Then you find have to hear the news. She hanged herself. Her brother found her, and her family is now one child short. That girl you may have had as one of your close friends for a period of time is gone. She no longer exists.

But the biggest individual tragedy is hiding what is happening to the rest of the old circles of friends from those days. You hear about those kids collapsing in college, the kid who couldn’t quite make that dream position he wanted and fell apart, the person who ended up in rehab and is a shadow of her former self. “What the hell is going on?!”

Just think about this. Your life’s main characters are being killed off. A person who had always been there has lost all hope and maybe all chance at living the life she could have lived. The person whose smiles and tears you saw so much is now non-existent, decaying in a grave or dust in an urn. Those “fragile lives and shattered dreams” are not confined to the broken urban neighborhoods; they are tearing apart your suburbs and loved friends, their families and destroying lives. WHO EVER THINKS ABOUT THESE THINGS?!

Who ever lets this rip through their emotions?! Who ever thinks about how tears apart those who had lived their lives around these people?! Why does no one allow themselves to let these thoughts and feelings sink in? If everyone started to appreciate the magnitude of these events in others’ lives, just as it shredding the livelihoods of those others, imagine how much more appreciation for the value of human life we would all have!

I heard about that person who hanged herself. I just had that best friend who barely survived her attempt at suicide and is in rehab. Will she ever be the same person, that amazing girl who can read past the 3rd grade level and walk on her own? I do not know. I can only hope. Yet there is so much more I can do and am doing. I wonder if everyone else is doing the same.

The greatest charity is to initiate the preservation of life, and setting my life around that goal comes from those things that almost got me down when I was younger: being bullied, being on the outside, feeling frustrated, depressed and hopeless. I told myself nothing was permanent and struggled to find my nitch. Few people are lucky enough to be successful in recovering, in such a way without therapy and without more challenges along the way.

We can build stronger foundations for stronger lives for the people who will have to face these same challenges in the future. We can try as much as we possibly can to eliminate those obstacles, and we can get far by doing that. I want to go into economic development for the sake of helping those people who will be in those problematic social situations. And I should hope the desire and motivation to prevent those things that are going to hurt individuals and the society of which they are apart come out of these types of emotional whirlwinds these experiences create.

But also bear in mind many of these obstacles are unavoidable. We should become stronger as people. Not by hiding our insecurities and becoming easily offended by the slightest off-color comment, but by acknowledging them. This is simple basic therapeutic advice, but it is so often ignored. Society’s problems come from the people who either ignore these tragedies are going on, or hide the agony that these tragedies cause. These things are going to happen, and we are better off acknowledging them and the pain they cause to make us all better people.


יהי רצון מלפניך ה' אלוקי ואלוקי אבותי, שתשלך מהרה רפואה שלמה מן השמים רפואה נפש ורפואה הגוף לחולה ג'ולי מיראנדה אם חולי ישראל. ב"סד