Palestine and Israel

Two unrelated thoughts. . . .

1. President Obama ventured into the 3,000 year war between Israel and the Palestinians this week, suggesting that peace talks should begin with a discussion of the 1967 borders (with land concessions from both sides) and that the Palestinians not take this to the United Nations (why not?). He tried to give something to both sides and took a tiny half-step in the Palestinian direction. As a consequence he is under attack by both sides with the Republicans promoting comments somewhere to the right of Benjamin Netanyahu.

The conflict remains, for now, intractable. Hamas, elected by the Palestinians, is still devoted to the complete destruction of Israel, while Israel. with its elected leaders, is still devoted to a humiliating apartheid repression of the Palestinians. But adults don't give up on peace. Obama deserves credit for attempting to move things along. In the end peace can come only from the Palestinians and Israelis, and my unorthodox view, approved of by few, is that this is one more war the United States should withdraw from.

2. Dan Walters, a conservative columnist for the Sacramento Bee, not often a favorite of mine, has published a piece on California's two-tiered economy. When he pointed out that Asian women in California have a life expectancy of 18 years more than Black males, it reinforced the truth that the rich live longer than the poor. If you value life, that's something to keep in mind. The two-tiered economy is not new, of course. The New Yorker recently noted that in 1887 the top one percent of Americans owned fifty-one per cent of the nation's wealth. That's worse than today, and it was the ideal Wall Street Republican nation, composed of the Rich and the wage slaves. Who needs a middle class?