Love of the Land: Peace for Land

Peace for Land

Jay D. Homnick
The American Spectator
26 January '10

"So, Sadie, why do you look so happy today?"

"I got a letter from my son Abe in Israel."

"And how is with Abe?"

"He lost all his money in a business, his apartment was damaged by a bomb and he had to wait a month to get a refrigerator."

"Then why so happy?"

"Because mine Abe writes such a beautiful Hebrew!"

This bit of Jewish gallows humor encapsulates much of the modern experience of having coreligionists, often relatives, in Israel. The grind of their everyday battle for survival is tolerated while the astonishing phenomenon of the revenant country and language is celebrated. The perfect metaphor for life in Israel is the ubiquitous habit there of eating sunflower seeds. They jam a fistful of unopened shells in their mouths, then walk down the street spitting the shells while somehow extracting the seeds with teeth and tongue, swallowing only the seeds. Israelis spend their lives dodging shells of one sort or another.

One of these is the shell game of the world-demanded American-sponsored Europe-monitored peace talks with the Palestinians. As matters are currently constituted, these are simply impossible to bring to a satisfactory conclusion. Sounds shocking, but no less true for all that.

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Love of the Land: Peace for Land

Love of the Land: Obama to Israel: Let’s start at the end

Obama to Israel: Let’s start at the end

Meryl Yourish
Yourish.com
10 January '10

As reported last week, the Obama administration is going to try to start at the end in order to report some kind of progress in Middle East peace talks. The thing is, you really can’t start at the end. You can work backwards in many things, but you can’t work backwards in a peace process where each side is supposed to show the steps it has taken to achieve the peace. But of course, the Palestinians have been arguing for the endgame from the very beginning, when the people doing the negotiating (or lack thereof) were the Arab states that had occupied Gaza and the West Bank from 1948 to 1967 (cf: Three No’s of Khartoum).

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday that once borders are agreed on, the dispute over settlements would be moot.

“Resolving borders resolves settlements, resolving Jerusalem resolves settlements,” Clinton said. “I think we need to lift our sights and instead of being looking down at the trees, we need to look at the forest.”

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Love of the Land: Obama to Israel: Let’s start at the end