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The Endless MountainThe Endless MountainThe Endless Mountain 04/09/2004 04:05 PM The FitROCK: If you look past the hideous site design, this is pretty cool. Click here to comment on this entry This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)The Endless MountainGrok Headline matches for The Endless MountainEndless WorkEndless Work 10/29/2003 12:13 AM Okey, this is the typical me, i can never get to satisfied with my current design, so that i have... Endless Summer, on DemandEndless Summer, on Demand 05/10/2004 06:04 AM Kerry Black is bringing world-class waves to the malls of America. Grab your board -- surf's up 6 a.m. to midnight, 365 days a year. By Carl Hoffman from Wired magazine. Endless Gmail StorageEndless Gmail Storage 04/01/2005 10:02 PM More from CES: Endless personal video
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 Things are usually the way they are for a reason.
But there are few situations in the world that appear, from a
distance,
as unreasonable as the war between Israel and Palestine, a war that
has
been going on, in essence, without let-up for more than half a
century.
At one point the efforts to reach a peace settlement got so close to
success that the negotiators on each side received Nobel Peace prizes
for their efforts. But the dream didn't last, and for reasons we
couldn't fathom, the cycle of bloodshed, escalation and retaliation
cranked up again and is now at firestorm levels, threatening to push
the entire Mideast into even more cataclysmic violence.The reason we couldn't fathom this, is because we've never lived there, never walked a mile in their shoes. In The New Yorker this week, Jeffrey Goldberg provides us with an excellent proxy for such an experience, as he crisscrosses the area, from Israel's "ideologues of aggressive settlement" to Palestinian mothers teaching their children the honour of death in the holy war against the Jews, describing what he sees and what he hears from those in power, and from those who have nothing. It is a gut-wrenching, depressing journey. You'll need to buy the May 31 edition to read it, and I would recommend it highly. Alternatively, you can listen to Goldberg summarize his findings, along with a slide show of photos by Gilles Peress, here. One of those photos, of a Palestinian woman peering through a temporary gap in the new Israeli Separation Wall, is reproduced above. Goldberg makes no secret of his personal view of all this: The
leaders of the Jewish national-religious camp do not adhere to
observable reality, They exist in the glorious Jewish past and in the
messianic future but not in the reality of today, in which Jewish
soldiers give their lives to protect settlements; in which
Palestinians
live and die at checkpoints; in which Israel is becoming a pariah
among
the nations; and in which Israel may one day cease to exist as a
democratic Jewish state.
[Michael Tarazi, legal advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team says] "Settlements are the vanguard of binationalism" -- a single state that would soon have an Arab majority. "I don't care if they build more. The longer they stay out there, the more Israel will appear to the world to be essentially an apartheid state."... "We have to look at the way the South Africans did it. The world is increasingly intolerant of the Zionist idea. We have to capture the imagination of the world. We have to make this an argument about apartheid." The view of the moderate majority on both sides is that the best of a sorry lot of options is to have Israel dismantle the settlements and withdraw from the pathetic Gaza Strip and the volatile West Bank, to the so-called Green Line, the UN-brokered treaty line after the last "official" war. But that majority view is very fragile, and violently opposed by a significant minority on both sides. The settlements in the occupied territories are the flash-point, where hugely outnumbered Jews, many of them vehemently anti-Arab, provocative, and uncompromising, are surrounded by largely militant Palestinians ready to lay down their lives to reclaim "their homeland", and protected by an Israeli army that has ceased being protectors and become an army of occupation, many of whom are all too willing to demonstrate violently which side they support, as Goldberg reports. There are no good guys and bad guys in this war, and every confrontation, of which there are thousands, at every checkpoint, every attack by Arab militants (many of them children), every razing of Palestinian homes to make way for more Iraqi settlements, every suicide bombing, radicalizes both sides and renders the position of the moderate majority untenable. The extremists on both sides, outnumbered though they may be, are firmly in control of the political agenda, and their every provocative act strengthens their position rather than ostracizing them. The "ideologues of aggressive settlement" on the Israeli side, and especially in the settlements, largely believe that all of the occupied territories are theirs by divine right, and that it is the will of God that all Arabs be expelled from their holy land in its entirety -- that, as their website says, "There is no Palestine". And the militants and zealots on the Palestinian side, among the poorest and most destitute people on the face of the Earth, and with one of the highest birth rates, state categorically that they would not stop fighting if Israel withdrew from Gaza and the West Bank, but would merely be encouraged to continue the war until all Jews were extinguished from their holy land. The rabidly intolerant have the will and the ready means to scuttle every attempt at compromise, to embarrass moderates, to incite violence and then say "I told you so." There is nothing particularly unique in this, of course. Many of the tribal wars in Africa, the ethnic wars in the Balkan states, and the insane religious war in Northern Ireland, exhibit the same shameful, and shameless, pattern of violence and intransigence. The next, inevitable attack by Islamic fundamentalists on US soil will surely produce the same knee-jerk result in the US, and launch another war to treat the symptoms and exacerbate the disease. Ariel Sharon, less moderate than most but less extreme than the extremists, has taken an impossible 'middle' course sure to satisfy no one: Withdraw from Gaza, kind of (there are a host of conditions that render the withdrawal largely a joke to Palestinians), and bulldoze Palestinian homes to build a mammoth wall, not along the Green Line but deep inside the West Bank to "protect" the Jewish settlements, which are everywhere, not just in the border areas. The partisan, bipartisan support he has received in the US shows how little America's leaders understand the realities of the area's politics. As I've said before, the only answer, and it will take decades, perhaps centuries to achieve, is to deal with the underlying humanitarian issues, to give Palestinians a reason to value peace, "something to lose", and help them build infrastructure and educational institutions, and a future to believe in. Poverty, ignorance and inequality, not religious and ethnic hatred, are the real enemies of peace. It doesn't matter whether the area is partitioned into two states, fairly or unfairly, or made into a single apartheid state. Things are the way they are for a reason, and in Israel-Palestine the reason is entrenched, and there is no short-term answer. No matter who represents the two sides, there will be decades of violence, war, and bloodshed to come, and it is inexcusable and ignorant of those of us who don't live there to take sides for cynical political gain. Let us instead -- as we should be doing in Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the other areas we have recklessly meddled in, in the absurd and arrogant belief that we understand the problems and have all the answers -- let us instead invest in infrastructure, in education, in building a better world even as the zealous minorities try to tear it apart. The founders of the religions we all claim to believe in would surely understand, and nod in assent. |
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On Sunday, my wife and son returned from Korea. They also brought a mountain of luggage, two full carts worth. Since my wife and I already had more than a decade of arguments over her seemingly unbreakable habit of moving mountains across oceans, all I could do was sigh and hug.
My wife and I are on the extreme opposites when it comes to luggage. I despise luggage so I travel very light.For a month long trip to Europe, I would take two underwears, two pairs of socks, two T-shirts, one jean, one slack, one jacket, and a pair of running shoes. Since I am going to be wearing one set of everything plus the jacket and the shoes, the spares could fit comfortably into a small carry-on. If the jacket has big pockets, I could travel without any bags but I use the carry-on to avoid getting grilled by immigration officers. And on my trips, I rarely buy anything I have to carry. If it's something big, I ship it.
My wife, on the other hand, carries everything.Her annual trips to Korea usually starts with increasing shopping activities a month or two before the trip. In buying her gifts, she ignores logic completely. I have seen her buying goods made in Korea as gifts to take back to Korea. On this trip, she brought back goods she bought at Costco in Korea, goods made right here in California. She said they were on sale over there and saving a few bucks on pots and pans made perfect sense to her. Oy.
And much of the luggage was food. For example, she brought back two boxes of ramyeon, dry noodle in a cup. Of course, our local Korean markets sell them by boxes too but my wife said these are fresher. Fresh instant noodle? Arghhhh!
When I was growing up in Korea, I frequently saw a Korean women carrying heavy stuff while her husband walked ahead with hands behind his back. Until I got married I didn't understand why Korean husbands weren't helping their wives. Why? It's because they already had their decade of fruitless arguments and all of them reached the same compromise. As for me, I help out despite my frustrations but also try to avoid travelling with her to Korea.
Between Mars and Venus lies an impenetrable astroid field of luggage.
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