Our own State Department said 64 years ago that establishing Israel would just create one war after another in the region. Yes, right up to the Iraq war. Moshe Dayan’s widow Ruth, 95, says the same thing, speaking to Rula Jebreal, at the Daily Beast: (thanks to Nima Shirazi):
“I am a proud Israeli. I’ve lived through every war, endured every moment of suffering, but I never stopped believing in peace. I lost friends and family members. I’m a peacemaker, but the current Israeli government does not know how to make peace. We move from war to war, and this will never stop. I think Zionism has run its course.”
Sometimes DoS gets things right. In the old days, when they still employed (had not yet fired) “old China hands”, old Arab hands, etc., DoS had some useful ideas.
Now it is all politicized which — in these oligarchic times — means controlled by big money. We tend to notice BIG ZIONISM. OWS notices BIG FINANCE.
–Off Topic Alert–
However, BIG OIL is pushing through the so-called Keystone XL pipeline to transfer — from Canada to USA’s ports — very dirty oil from Canada’s very dirty tar sands extraction stations. The prospect for terrible environmental damage to USA from building and running the pipeline is enormous, but DoS is pushing it. Let global warming be damned as well as the more immediate environmental damage.
It is like raising a child . What sort of values was Israel raised with ?
After graduating, Raine began his work at Hull, where he did time with murderers, rapists, and pedophiles. “The main thing I learned was that I really can’t change these people,” he says. “It brought me back to kids, to earlier stages, thinking we’ve got to look at the earlier, predisposing factors, when maybe we can do something.” Along with several other researchers, he has pioneered the science of neurodevelopmental criminology, which has established that among adult offenders, juvenile delinquents, and even younger children there are features in the brain that seem to reduce fear, impair decision making, and blunt emotional reactions to others’ distress.
http://www.utne.com/Science-Technology/Neurodevelopmental-Criminology-Acquired-Sociopathy-Predict-Criminals.aspx#ixzz1cYoVCGuV
Me too, Ruth.
I wonder if Ruth’s idea of peace is like that of her late husband:
We don’t have a solution, and you will continue living like dogs, and whoever wants will go, and will see how this procedure will work out. For now, it works out. Let’s say the truth. We want peace. If there is no peace, we will maintain military rule and we will have four to five military compounds on the mountains, and they will sit ten years under the Israeli military regime.
– Moshe Dayan
Translation: “I’ve suffered a lot while pushing Arabs outside Israel, but now I’m old and I think we should be kind with our neighbours and let them have the crowded, bombed ghettoes they live in. It’s pretty clear they’re not going to leave anyway.”
I think we have to give Ruth Dayan (in contrast to Mr. Goldstone) a great deal of credit for refusing to compromise her principles and values. She is a courageous and good person who has managed to maintain (and probably–enhance) her personal integrity over the course of her long life thus far. Ruth obviously values human beings generally instead of a particular subset of the species. Ruth, you are a true role model and inspiration!