Israel v. Palestine

Being truly objective when discussing the Middle East peace process can prove difficult because the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has a convenient elasticity and it changes dramatically depending on who is telling it and where they start the story and the story of Israel/Palestine and the origins of the current issues are indeed complicated. Israel/Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire (now Turkey) and was a piece of the province of Syria. It was populated largely by Arabs who were Muslims (about 80 percent; Christians (a bit more than 10 percent; Jews (a bit less than 10 per cent). The province was a bit of a backwater. Jerusalem and surrounding Christian sites were no doubt the main interest of Westerners. The Ottomans fought on the side of the Axis Powers (Germany, etc.) and were defeated in 1917 by General Allenby of the British Army. The end of the Ottoman Empire followed and for all intents and purposes the British were in charge until after WWII. The British are central to the story from this point. The League of Nations divided up pieces of the Ottoman Empire, assigning this parcel to the British. The British had previously agreed in the Balfour Agreement to allow Jewish settlers (Zionists) to immigrate and settle there. The Zionists had actually been doing this from the end of the 19th century. The British favored the Zionist settlement. First, because many of them were bible-reading Protestants who thought the Jews should return to Zion. And along with many Europeans, they thought this would settle the Jewish question by providing a homeland, a nation for them (in an era of high nationalist views). In general the local population of Arabs were opposed to Jewish settlement both under the Ottomans and the British. I think this is key: the Zionists were modernizers within their own Jewish community and certainly in contrast to the Arabs of Palestine who were largely an agricultural, herding society with several elite families more or less culturally and economically dominant. The Arabs were unprepared for the events that followed. The Zionists, i.e., Jewish settlers bought up land from both the local elite and absentee landlords living elsewhere. This no doubt upset the local land usage practices and tenancy agreements. Skip to WWII. The British having put down an Arab rebellion 1936-39 were deeply concerned about Arab loyalty and feared their alliance with Germany. To placate the Arabs, they banned Jewish immigration. Nonetheless, the Yushuv (Jewish community in Palestine) was well organized economically, politically, and culturally. Various Jewish military forces were organized to support the British giving the Yushuv well trained soldiers and various kinds of armaments of use in the 1948 war with the Arabs. The end of the war and news of the Holocaust turned world opinion in favor of the establishment of the Jewish state. The Arabs remained divided among themselves and were no match for the better organized Jewish community. When the British mandate ended, Israel became a state authorized by the UN; the Arabs protested mightily but seemed unable to either unite themselves or to effectively press their own legitimate claims to a state. While their territory was recognized in the UN ruling, it was actually to be part of Transjordan under the Kinga plan the British favored.What we have here is a struggle between the modern and not yet modern; between Jews with national aspirations and Arabs still existing in a quasi-feudal system. The Jews were favored by the West; the Arabs of Palestine had no effective support from the then nascent Arab League, formed after WWII. With all that said, regardless of who supports you, you can not claim land that does not belong to you as your own. It is illegal. Israel did just that and that makes them the aggressor. Anything that happens after that is in reaction to the initial illegal act. 

Israeli officials and supporters in the U.S. such as Alan Dershowitz, said that 7 million Israelis were the “victims” and the 1.7 million in Gaza were the “aggressors” in the latest round of large-scale Israeli military attacks on Gaza and the responding rockets fired from Gaza. Many people know so little about the conflict that they believe the Palestinians are always the “aggressor’” and that Israel is always the “victim” of unjustified Arab hatred and hostility. What is seldom mentioned on television is that the “victim” has the biggest military in the region with the most advanced air, land and sea forces, has nuclear weapons (which they have never allowed to be inspected) and an annual $3 billion dollar military aid gift from the United States. The “aggressor” has no air force, no ground force and no naval force, and the various militias in Gaza use primarily  $150 rockets made by hand from tubes and propellant smuggled across or under the border with Egypt. The worldwide audience hears the “victim” relying on the charge that the “aggressor” hides its rockets in civilian areas to justify the incredible disproportionate use of force and the targeting of the “aggressor’s” non-military civilian infrastructure such as civilian government buildings, including virtually all police stations, civilian vehicle depots, and government documentation facilities for travel documents and property deeds and the council of ministers office, as well as schools, and sports fields. Most people don’t realize that the “aggressor’s” land is very small — only 25 miles long and five miles wide, and very densely populated. There is little space where there are no civilians. In fact, virtually the only area with no civilians is the Israeli declared no-go zone, 1,000 meters (3,000 feet or 10 football fields) into Gaza land that has been cleared of homes and agricultural crops to give the Israeli Defense Forces a “kill” zone where anyone who comes into the area is shot. Many people never bother to think how strange it is that the “victim” could have the power to have instituted a land-and-sea blockade on the “aggressor,”  in which the “victim” directly controls access to the “aggressor’s” land on three out of four borders, including the sea, and strongly influences control on the fourth border (Egypt). The “victim” claims that its blockade of the “aggressor” is simply a means of keeping out weapons from the territory, but the blockade has always included a stark limitation on food and materials allowed into Gaza, and also a ban on almost  all exports from the aggressor, crippling the economy, while having no connection to weapons imports. Dov Weisglass, an adviser to the victim’s former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, explained the rationale of the blockade: “The idea is to put the ‘Aggressors’ on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” A 2008 study by the “victim’s” Ministry of Defense of the minimum daily humanitarian food needs of the “aggressor” revealed that the “victim” allowed in to the aggressor’s territory substantially less than the minimum daily amount of food needed by the population. According to Army Colonel and author Ann Wright, "The Israeli characterization of themselves as “victims” is refuted by their violent, inhuman and unjust treatment of the Palestinians whom they refer to as the “aggressors.” Indeed, the Israeli government is the true aggressor and the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are the victims."

According to debate wise, "The Jews have worked hard for the land and they deserve it. Before the Zionist movement started, in the 19th century, the land was a barren, dead land. The Ottoman empire ruled in Israel, and they left it in this poor condition. When the Jews began coming to Israel, they bought many acres of land from the Turks, and changed the desert that was Israel into a thriving live area. As anyone who reads Mark Twain's book "The Innocents Abroad" will know, if it wasn't for the Jews, Israel would be a wasteland today. All this land was bought from the hard- earned money of European Jews - the US did not contribute a cent to the Jewish state until the late 1940s. The Jews have waited to return to this land for thousands of years, and they have done a better job than anybody else, therefore they deserve this land."

In my opinion, the Jews have but little ancestral claim to this land. No one alive today was the one thrown out of Israel thousands of years ago, thus, they have no claim to the land. I can not go back to Donegal, Ireland and claim the family land as my own now even after only 100 years removed nevermind the timeframe the Jewish community is working with. And frankly, America can thank its support for Israel for virtually all the problems it faces in the middle east today. It is time to end our unwavering support for the state of Israel. Such unwavering support from the world's superpower only emboldens Israel. It must be said that the Jewish community is by and large a great, hard working and respectable people, however, I believe the state of Israel is the aggressor and both Israeli's and Palestinian's should do everything in their power to move forward with the peace process. As difficult as it may be. 

The War on Drugs

In June of 1971 President Nixon declares the War on Drugs and drug abuse in the United States “Public Enemy #1”. Let’s observe some history leading up to this declaration. Drugs have been around for a long time in fact many currently illegal drugs, such as marijuana, opium, coca, and psychedelics have been used for thousands of years for both medical and spiritual purposes and only somewhat recently in the United States have they become illegal. Often it has had everything to do with who was associated with these drugs that lead to the criminalization of them. Let’s take a look: The first anti-opium laws in the 1870s were directed at Chinese immigrants, the first anti-cocaine laws, in the South in the early 1900s, were directed at black men and the first anti-marijuana laws, in the Midwest and the Southwest in the 1910s and 20s, were directed at Mexican migrants and Mexican Americans. In late 1960s recreational drug use becomes fashionable among young, white, middle class Americans. The social stigmatization previously associated with drugs lessens as their use becomes more main stream. Drug use becomes representative of protest and social rebellion in the era's atmosphere of political unrest. In 1970, hippies were smoking pot and dropping acid. Soldiers were coming home from Vietnam hooked on heroin. Embattled President Richard M. Nixon seized on a new war he thought he could win. "This nation faces a major crisis in terms of the increasing use of drugs, particularly among our young people," Nixon said as he signed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act. The following year, he said: "Public enemy No. 1 in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive." His first drug-fighting budget was $100 million. Now it's $15.1 billion, 31 times Nixon's amount even when adjusted for inflation. But has this prohibition worked?

 In 1925, H. L. Mencken wrote an impassioned plea: "Prohibition has not only failed in its promises but actually created additional serious and disturbing social problems throughout society. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic but more. There is not less crime, but more. ... The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not increased, but diminished." Also, prison populations have soared from about 40,000 people in U.S. jails and prisons for drug crimes in 1980, compared with more than 500,000 today. Excessively long prison sentences and locking up people for small drug offenses contribute greatly to this ballooning of the prison population. It also represents racial discrimination and targeting disguised as drug policy. People of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than white people -- yet from 1980 to 2007, blacks were arrested for drug law violations at rates 2.8 to 5.5 times higher than white arrest rates and after over a trillion dollars spent since its inception the flow of drugs over our borders has not decreased one iota and the U.S. now has the largest prison population in the world, with about 2.3 million behind bars. More than half a million of those people are incarcerated for a drug law violation. Viewing both sides of the isle, Democrats have less strict beliefs on the sentencing for drug related crimes and are much more tolerant. However, medical drugs are another matter and they want these drugs highly regulated. While Republicans believe recreational drugs are absolutely forbidden. On the other hand, Republicans would allow you to prescribe and buy medical drugs without constraint as the drug industry is quite profitable.

The more effective prohibition is at raising costs, the greater are drug industry revenues. So, more effective prohibition means that drug sellers have more money to buy guns, pay bribes, fund the dealers, and even research and develop new technologies in drug delivery and smuggling systems, like cocaine submarines. It’s hard to beat an enemy that gets stronger the more you strike against them. At the recent Association of Private Enterprise Education conference, David Henderson from the Naval Postgraduate School outs the myriad of ways in which the government promises to make us safer and in fact imperils our safety and security, “The drug war is an obvious example. In the name of making us safer and protecting us from drugs, we are actually put in greater danger. Without meaning to, the drug warriors have turned American cities into war zones and eroded the very freedoms we hold dear. Freedom of contract has been abridged in the name of keeping us “safe” from drugs. Private property is less secure because it can be seized if it is implicated in a drug crime, this also flushes the doctrine of “innocent until proven guilty” out the window. The drug war has also been used as a pretext for clamping down on immigration. Not surprisingly, the drug war has turned some of our neighborhoods into war zones. We are warehousing productive young people in prisons at an alarming rate all in the name of a war that cannot be won.” Albert Einstein is reported to have said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. By this definition, the drug war is insane. We are no safer, and we are certainly less free because of concerted efforts to wage war on drugs. It’s time to stop the insanity and end prohibition.

Guns in America

There are a lot of guns in America today. Just how many you ask? Well, too many. In fact, as of 2007, the United States lead the world with a per capita basis of 89 guns for every 100 citizens, a commanding lead over subsequent countries of Serbia with 58.2, Yemen with 54.8, Switzerland with  45.7, and Finland at 45.3. In fact, U.S. citizens own 270 million of the world's 875 million known firearms, according to the 2007 Small Arms Survey by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies. About 4.5 million of the 8 million new guns manufactured worldwide each year are purchased in the United States, it said. "There is roughly one firearm for every seven people worldwide. Without the United States, though, this drops to about one firearm per 10 people," it said. Germany, France, Pakistan, Mexico, Brazil and Russia were next in the ranking of country's overall civilian gun arsenals. Today, gun violence seems to be omnipresent in America as never before and people are demanding action from our government to quell the threat. Something must be done to protect our children. But what is the answer? Let’s look at some facts.

There were 8,583 homicides by firearms in 2011, out of 12,664 homicides total, according to the FBI. This means that more than two-thirds of homicides involve a firearm. 6,220 of those homicides by firearm (72%) are known to have involved a handgun. It's worth noting that violent crime rates of all types have been steadily decreasing since the early 1990s. No one is quite sure what is causing this decrease, though there are many theories, ranging from tighter gun control laws to more innovative policing and changes in the drug market. Whatever the cause of this decline, America still has a homicide rate of 4.7 murders per 100,000 people, which is one of the highest of all developed countries. Gun violence also affects more than its victims. In areas where it is prevalent, just the threat of violence makes neighborhoods poorer. It's very difficult to quantify the total harm caused by gun violence, but by asking many people how much they would pay to avoid this threat -- a technique called contingent valuation -- researchers have estimated a cost to American society of $100 billion dollars. The firearms debate usually revolves around "gun control", that is, laws that would make guns harder to buy, carry, or own. But this is not the only way of reducing gun violence. It is possible to address gun use instead of availability. For example, Project Exile moved all gun possession offenses in Richmond, Virginia, to federal courts instead of state courts, where minimum sentences are longer. Policies like these, which concern gun use, are sometimes said to operate on gun "demand," as opposed to gun control laws, which affect "supply." Similarly, while the idea of new laws gets most of the attention, some projects have focused on enforcing existing laws more effectively, or changing policing strategies the way Boston's Operation Ceasefire did in the 1990s. In fact, launching community-based programs has proven to be one of the most effective strategies for reducing gun violence. There have also been programs based on other principles, such as public safety education and gun buy-back campaigns. The White House proposals address both gun access and gun use, and include both new laws and enhanced enforcement of existing laws. Although countries that offer easier access to guns also have more gun violence, at least among developed nations, this doesn't necessarily mean that more guns cause more deaths. People may own more guns in dangerous places because they want to protect themselves. It's also possible that gun ownership is a deterrent to crime, because criminals must consider the possibility that their intended victim is armed. Economist John Lott did extensive work on this question in the late 1990s, culminating in his 1998 book More Guns, Less Crime. He studied the effect of right-to-carry laws by examining violent crime rates before and after they were implemented in various states, up until 1992, and concluded that such laws decreased homicides by an average of 8%. Lott's data and methods have been extensively reviewed since then. A massive 2004 report by a 16-member panel of the National Research Council found that there was not enough evidence to say either way whether right-to-carry laws affected violence. In 2010, different researchers re-examined Lott's work, the NRC report, and additional data up through 2006, and reaffirmed that there is no evidence that right-to-carry laws reduce crime. Meanwhile, other studies have suggested that reduced access to guns would result in less crime. These studies compared homicide rates with gun availability in various states and cities. The most comprehensive estimate is that a 10% reduction in U.S. households with guns would result in a 3% reduction in homicides. Internationally, the effect of reductions in gun ownership might be much larger. This might have to do with the large number of guns already available in the U.S.  Any reduction in gun violence hinges on whether gun control laws would actually make it prohibitively difficult to get a gun. 

I live in Massachusetts and I think this state is doing the right thing in terms of a common sense approach to the protection of rights and most importantly responsible gun laws and licensing. I would like to see all states adopt this approach to gun laws.  In fact in 1998, Massachusetts passed what was hailed as the toughest gun-control legislation in the country. Among other stringencies, it banned semiautomatic “assault” weapons, imposed strict new licensing rules, prohibited anyone convicted of a violent crime or drug trafficking from ever carrying or owning a gun, and enacted severe penalties for storing guns unlocked. The 1998 legislation did cut down, quite sharply, on the legal use of guns in Massachusetts. Within four years, the number of active gun licenses in the state had plummeted. “There were nearly 1.5 million active gun licenses in Massachusetts in 1998,” the AP reported. “In June 2002, that number was down to just 200,000.”  But the law that was so tough on law-abiding gun owners had quite a different impact on criminals. Since 1998, gun crime in Massachusetts has gotten worse, not better. In 2011, Massachusetts recorded 122 murders committed with firearms, a striking increase from the 65 in 1998. Other crimes rose too. Between 1998 and 2011, robbery with firearms climbed 20.7 percent. Aggravated assaults jumped 26.7 percent. Don’t hold your breath waiting for gun-control activists to admit they were wrong. The treatment they prescribed may have yielded the opposite of the results they promised, but they’re quite sure the prescription wasn’t to blame. Crime didn’t rise in Massachusetts because the state made it harder for honest citizens to lawfully carry a gun; it rose because other states didn’t do the same. Guns don’t have borders. It’s time to button down the hatches on gun laws. Until we do illegal guns will flow, like drugs, through the path of least resistance and into states regardless of their laws.  Let’s all get on the same page here.