> Well, the IDF is bulldozing their homes, which are, if
> anything, structures fixed to the ground, incapable of
> moving. The world witnesses this, alright, and yet
> still nothing happens. What options do normal
> Palestinians have? How would "leaving their anger in
> the past," as you suggest, stop them from being
> oppressed?
a) "Leaving their anger in the past" was not my suggestion; it was Todd's restatement of what I wrote.
b) I don't know what the Palestinians should do. At this point, I don't see any hope for either them or the Israelis. They've painted themselves into a corner, where they are huddled together scratching each other's eyes out, and apparently neither they nor anyone in the outside world has any idea how to get them out of it. I think we have to face the fact that some problems, like squaring the circle, are just insoluble. Americans like to think there is a "can-do" approach to every social or political problem, and the person who comes up with it gets a bright shiny apple from the teacher, or a Nobel Prize, but I take a more tragic view of human affairs. Perhaps someone someday will come up with a brilliant way to bring peace to that miserable part of the world, but I don't have the faintest idea of what it would be.
c) And why is it that the world doesn't seem to have sympathy for the Palestinians? I repeat -- if you were occupying a neighboring population, and they were blowing you up in your restaurants and on your buses, indiscriminately, how much sympathy could you work up for them? The same applies in spades to the outside world, especially Americans, who don't pay much attention to the rest of the world as long as their own soldiers aren't involved.
There might have been a time, quite a while ago, when a nonviolent Palestinian campaign might have gotten them somewhere. Even better would have been a joint campaign by Palestinians and Israelis (remember that the U.S. civil rights movement in the '60s involved blacks and whites -- at least it did until the whites were ejected by groups like CORE), led by prominent Muslim and Jewish religious leaders. And in fact there have been attempts to get such a campaign going, now and then. But I think it's too late for that -- not only would the Israelis stomp on it, as you suggest, but so would the Palestinian "militants."
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ Belinda: Ay, but you know we must return good for evil. Lady Brute: That may be a mistake in the translation.
-- Sir John Vanbrugh: The Provok’d Wife (1697), I.i.