Current Events

The news about Israeli attacks in Gaza and Lebanon has distracted me from the series of posts about my experiences in Jordan. It seems to me that most people in the region view the Israelis as practicing a type of apartheid that we justly condemned in South Africa. A view of how U.S. policy has been set on this issue is contained in a recent article by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html

I liken the dispute between the Israelis and Palestinians to a domestic dispute. The police officer [USA] arrives at the dispute and sees that the two parties have been fighting. Following a policy that has been in place for decades he tells the two to work out their differences. The Israelis are the large male who has battered the woman [the Palestinians]. This strategy was not effective in family violence situations. Current law and practices require that the officer determine who the primary aggressor is in the situation and intervene to protect the other.