The Long Road Towards Peace in the Middle East

Many long years ago in the early 1970s I put together a collection of essays originally to be called Dissent and the Rule of Law, which an aggressive publisher switched on me to Revolution and the Rule of Law. At that time a number of us in my field, which spanned law, political science, and philosophy, were concerned with achieving social justice without recourse to violence. Needless to say civil disobedience was the route that we shared -- that distinctive American product that permitted strong protest against injustice without resort to outright revolution.

Several of those with whom my own concerns resonated are still around and striving in similar directions:

http://www.law.uchicago.edu/faculty/gottlieb/


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Walzer

Gidon in those days was quietly traveling around the Middle East, trying to work out peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. I see from the current bio that he is still at it.

Michael Walzer was most recently protesting our attack on Iraq and suggesting less drastic means by which we could have whittled back Hussein and eventually achieved his replacement.

All three of us, incidentally, had British universities in our backgrounds and came at things with a slightly less nationalistic bent in our concerns.

I have not been in touch with either in some time, but imagine from what I can see of their evolving bios that we would still share similar approaches to the current Middle East conflicts.

The U.S. has made a mess in Afghanistan and Iraq and may have set back the achievement of modern democracy by decades, if not longer, by intervening clumsily into the situations of those two countries and, thereby, generating chaos.

Iraq is a mad mess -- where is the Queen of Hearts -- down the rabbit hole?

Needless to say the most recent venture of Israel with military force into Gaza with attendant destruction of the infrastructure there runs parallel to our American assaults in Iraq -- Fallusha and now our latest depredations -- here, there, and elsewhere. Our media blithely report the insurgents killed daily in each country by the dozens and mildly mention regrets about the deaths of innocents. Needless to say these regrets -- even with minimal payments of compensation here and there -- are not going to heal the wounds.

Most recently I have opened up yet another Yahoo group focused on working towards truth and reconciliation in Israel/Palestine:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Israel_Palestine

I don't expect many group members to join this list -- one is likely to become a target of vilification these days if one takes a stand against nationalist violence. But I am learning much and passing along quite a bit of information, including links to various sources of information, ranging from A.I.P.A.C. to more peace oriented groups than I would have hoped to find.

I must get in touch with my former wider colleagues and find out how their thinking is going now. We need creative solutions in the face of the outright stupid brutality of the Bush administration and the panicked reactions of the Israeli one.
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"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
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Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Israel_Palestine
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