It’s not that I’m worldly and intelligent and astute of global affairs. But the reality is that you are in fact a dumbshit who comes to me to know what to do with your mutually hell-forsaken life. So do your dirty work as quietly as you can, and while you receive $5,280 for every one of your billed hours, I will ride like a sumbitch, I will carve up the waves and the asphalt and pull an eleven-second quarter mile at whatever place actually does a functional job of replacing Bandimere.
You can’t ride like me, but you can ride close enough to how I ride that you’ll be able to fool most of the people most of the time. And that will pay for your dumb-ass $140,000 nerd-mobile.
So for what it’s worth, in comparison to your dumb-ass, I am just a slightly less intense dipshit that you are, and so you come to me so you can learn how to fix this mess that you and your’n have created.
First off, most of the people who have anything to say about Israel and Palestine are not in harms way. They do not have to fear an Israeli mortar or phosphorus come through their roof, they do not have to fear some crazy terrorist kidnap them, rape them and leave their decapitated body in alley, they do not have fear the whump-whump sound of a heavy lift helicopter, or hope for the whump-whump of that same heavy lift helicopter to get them out of a burning mayhem. No sir, most of the people who have anything to say about Palestine and Israel will not be awoken tonight by the sound of a rocket, or a gunshot, or a dream where you heard her actual voice, and you woke up at 3:00 am and for a moment, she was still there, still able to make new memories.
The folks look at the ideological sparring as a kind of popularity contest. Their most common fear is not being blown to bits in a war, but rather choosing the wrong side. They will drive media views to one side or the other, they will increase market share, their eyeballs will drive defense industry profits here or possibly there. If their eyeballs drive the defense industry profits here, then the folks up on the sixteenth floor will get their payday. If they eyeballs drive the defense industry profits there, then the folks up on the thirteenth floor will get their payday. But both sides will belly up to their blame game, because it’s all they really know how to do, ultimately. Having not been properly trained in the subtle craft of nation-building, they are forced to revert to our common entropically-derived default of tearing things to shit.
Israel fucked up sometime after I was there.
I was there in the 1980s and the results of accepting Arafat as a political leader had flowered into a peace in the West Bank, to where I could walk all over Palestine and my biggest danger was making too many friends in the engine-tuner community. Back when I was there, the Palestinian kids tuned those indestructable Japanese shitboxes into performance machines, and they did at least five years before it got big in the USA. They were broke enough to have to build their own cold-air intakes out of scrap aluminum, use Bondo like a religious talisman, and of course, put the Palestinian flag over the hoods because Palestine represents. I never got to see a race with the Israeli tuners, but the borders were pretty damned open when I was there, at least around Jerusalem. There wasn’t a lot of terrorism because the hopelessness was gone for a time. Palestinians saw their futures in a United Israel, Palestine and Jordan. Unfortunately, I was just too far outside of that culture to get into the Israeli tuner garages. Half of the Israeli tuners had grown up in places like Long Island anyway. And they tuned better quality cars than the Palestinians, but they didn’t win all of those races. Some of those little Palestinian Datsuns had a lot of weight stripped out of them, the engine had been rebuilt twice to run deep into redline, and they just kicked ass. And it was a long time ago, so my memory is not complete, but if I remember correctly, the government at that time was working to add a minimum drinking age, apparently because Israeli teens were getting shitfucked on Macabee beer and racing drunk. Talk about a “peacetime problem”!
The point is, the Palestinians one both sides of the saddle saw a future for themselves in the emerging regional economy.
And then, that went to shit, jobs disappeared, the defense industry and the terrorism industry started to hire workers again, and there was inevitably a compliant dupe somewhere would do some terrorism and get the wars going again. It’s the nature of the folks up on the sixteenth floor.
Yes, they will fill a town square in support of Palestine and another town square in support of Israel, and what they accomplish better than anything else is to provide accurate, real-time data of public sentiment so that the folks in contracting know if they should send the work order up to the sixteenth floor of the thirteenth floor.
Israel fucked up sometime after I was there, and they didn’t get hold of their reactionaries who want to burn down Israel and Palestine together to bring their demented religious fairy tales to life. The Christians have their version, the Jews have their version, the Muslims have their version, and Israel fucked up by not getting ahead of the religious zealots with guns.
But here we are, and that was then, this is now, so what to do?
- Israel accepts the Hamas ceasefire. Yes, it sucks, they kicked ass and now they have power, but sometimes you gotta call an Arafat because children have a right not to have their lives blown to shit by a bunch of ideologically-motivated ne’er do wells who claim to hold the moral high ground.
- Israel accepts that some of the these terrorists are going to rebrand themselves as elected leaders. Yes sucks, but that’s on you, the kids didn’t have any part in this.
- Hamas, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority all pledge to disengage from their border walls. If Egypt wants to get on board and disengage from their border wall, that would be helpful to their place in the emerging regional economic development. But if Jordan decides against disengagement from their border walls, then I am sufficiently-experienced experienced in the craft of nation-building that I am quite sure none of this will work. But, as one of the only consistently coherent and structured governments in the region, I believe that Jordan will disngage from their border walls when they can get some reliable contracts from Israel, Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority. Hamas will then be pressed with some tough choices, because the future of Gaza is democratic-republic, and if they expect to hold down their end with Egypt and Israel, they will have to find a way to keep the hotheads in check.
- Gaza needs at least two deep-water ports and investment into employee-owned port facilities and services. The ownership of that industry is already in Gaza, and they already have the expertise to modernize and automate the port operations. With disengagement from the border walls, the industry and local businesses can then work to remove the barriers, build cross-border commerce and get the land-bridge cargo conduit through the industrial center of Gaza, through Israel, through the West Bank, into the regional logistics in Jordan for destinations in Iraq, UAE, Saudia, and ideally build the return conduit from Yemen. Would it be cheaper to build an alternate water route? Maybe, but that’s not the point. Egypt runs the Suez Canal with world-class efficiency, and it has a sufficient capacity. Egypt has already committed to major investments into capacity upgrades. A land bridge offers a commitment to environmental stewardship and the ability to upgrade at a much lower cost than a canal. Initially, the land bridge could encompass existing roadways and treaty-defined border crossings. That can be upgraded between logistic mounts with rail, and then potentially using fenced-off zones for cargo transport using Wing-in-Ground Effect cargo planes that operate close to the ground and offer one of the most advantageous weight-time metrics in the industry. The only thing that we can all know for certain of the land bridge, is that it will have very little freshwater. But TITME, right? This is the Middle East, and we must do what we must do. To get to there from here, means dropping the blame game, as I carefully instructed the Security Council more than once. And yes R., if you’re reading this, I know it was you who called U.N. Security on me and told them I wrote graffiti on one of the Chagals in the Secretariat. First off, I would never write on someone else’s canvas, because I’m not as good as Jean-Michel. Even in the tunnels, I don’t write over other tags. But you had to have known that my motorcycle was broken then, so I rode my Snakeboard to the Secretariat for about a month. I guess it was a good joke in retrospect. But back then, I was hugely honored to be able to speak in front of the Security Council. I found myself in one of the security offices, I’m playing with my little Palm Pilot, those were big back then. The security guards were running all over the Secretariat to confirm that I hadn’t spoofed the cameras and drawn on one of the Chagals. And before they were even done, Eddy comes in and tells them to let me go, I was supposed to speak in front of the Security Council. The guard there looked like this kind of thing happened every day. Some skatepunk being held on suspicion of defacing a Chagal is also wanted in the Security Council? The guard says to Eddy, “bring him back here when you’re done with him.” And Eddy did it! After the whole shebang, I had the representative from Namibia offering to buy me a drink, a really great looking gal from one of the European delegations, she’s trying to get my ear. And Eddy tells everyone “I have to take him back to the guard’s office. I figure I can get back to the cocktail event before that woman from the European delegation leaves, so I rush back to the guard’s office, he and Eddy looked like they moved a bit slower than usual. He tells me everything is fine and they are going to look into who made the call. I leave Eddy there talking to the guard, and I run back down the main hallway past all the Chagalls and up to the delegate dining room, but she was gone. “Stole the only girl I loved, drowned her deep inside of me.” So I drank with the dude from Namibia. He turned out to be pretty chill, definitely from one of the old German families in Windhoek. He adored the Oshiwambo culture. He was still employed by the Namibian government of the time, so he could come right out as lover of the native culture, but he didn’t do much to hide it either. I looked into his family at some point, they still lived outside of Windhoek, and they’re comfortable, but they divested of most of their property as a family. I thought that was pretty neat, a generation of kids raised in the way of humanism and they walked the walk. I digress … my point is that I warned the Security Council to just stop wasting valuable time on their blame game. Most of the time they ignore me, some of the time they don’t. And when they don’t ignore me, they get things done. Treaties get teeth over the real enemy, which is not each other, but poverty.
- There will inevitably be some trickle-through terrorism in Israel, but it’s better than the avalanche of it that triggered this war. And it will be painful when we lose those who we love to stay committed to peace. But sometimes we have to put aside our pain and anger to give children a chance at a future. This isn’t their war.