Gimme. Gimme some Lovin"

“That until that day, the dream of lasting peace, world citizenship, rule of international morality, will remain but a fleeting vision to be pursued but never attained. Now everywhere is war. …War in the east, war in the west, war up north, war down south. War, war, rumors of war” (Bob Marley, “War”)

It was not great-balls-of-fire, the Cairo speech of Pres. Obama but as I was reading the transcript, he gained a dash of sympathy for his desire to “remake this world” but at what expense, whose expense, it’s a gray area to me.

He had the audacity to warn Iran of its nuclear mischief and Palestine for its violent adventures but stood firm on “US unbreakable bond with Israel, bound by historical and cultural ties.” He identified anti-Semitism as the root of the Jews’ tragic history and appealed to both camps, Israel and Palestine, to respect each other’s aspiration of establishing a nation.

At this point, allow me to quote the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano who wrote “Operation Unpunished Lead” as a tribute to his Jewish friends killed by Latin American dictatorship-regimes and who himself is in the deathlist because of his political activism:

“Hunting the Jews was always a European custom but since half a century, that historical debt is being paid for by the Palestinians who are also Semites but who never were, nor are, anti-Semites. They are paying, in blood money, the price of others.

In Gaza, 3 of every 10 collateral damages are children. Dangerous people in charge of enormous manipulative media invite us to think that each Israeli life is worth as much as a hundred Palestinian lives.

And as always, always the same: in Gaza, a hundred for one. For each hundred Palestinians killed, one Israeli.”

Hubris, this talk of “remaking the world,” after all, it’s US foreign policies that fucked this world, by and large. It’s tragic that the Arab quagmire cannot be solved by the Arabs but needs the meddling hands of the US. Oh, how disdainful are we of meddlesome old folks putting a wedge on star-crossed lovers whom we are heavily cheering for, not that Israel and Palestine are star-crossed lovers but a more concrete analogy eludes me at this point. Just a bit there, with a little deviation in visualization.

There is a strong belief that an Israel-Palestine settlement is a function of American political will. In realpolitik, that means an overhaul of US foreign policy. A halt to US acquiescence to Israel’s expansionist activities and its general bullishness is a big step. But Israel has expressed that it won’t yield to US demands, there goes your favorite brat.

Fiction has overtaken us on this. Fiction introduced us to Faust who sold his soul to the Devil, of Midas and his obsession with gold, of Dr. Frankenstein creating a vicious monster. Let’s go back to our libraries and revisit how these stories ended.