Sustainable Development is whatever we do that is both good for us and good for our descendants. What is good is a long list of mutually supportive achievements.
Often we mistakenly imagine that sustainable development can be accomplished without hot and dirty politics and that somehow it can surface out of nowhere. In fact, we realize, when we are honest with ourselves, that every kind of sustainable development involves hard struggles of people against people, of ideas against ideas. The best action we can take on behalf of sustainable development is often surprisingly easy, in itself, but it follows and is the outcome of a bitter political struggle. For example, the great ideas of the Rights of Man emerged in practice from terrible English, American and French Revolutions.
So I am putting my shoulder to the wheel of sustainable development in the way I know best -- as a political philosopher and historian. I am going to grapple with American politics as the source of some of our problems, and more particularly the politics of the United States and Israeli governments as obstacles to sustainable development.
As I speak, it will become more and more apparent that resolution of the chaos of the Near East will be one of the largest most practical leaps that we could possibly take into a world with a sustainable future. But to put the Israelis and Palestinians in a position to solve their problems together and wisely, we must engage in a political campaign, a forceful, unhesitating, and aggressive campaign. It is a campaign in which we should banish a thousand bad leaders and gain a thousand good leaders.
At this moment of history, the Government of the United States of America is less liked by the people of the World than at any time since its famous Declaration of Independence of 1776.
As if to confirm the worst tendencies of the Bush Presidency, the Congress, both Senate and House, when the month of May, 2002 began, voted overwhelmingly for resolutions that praised the cruel behavior of the Israel government, and lashed out against the impotent Palestine authority. It was not only a kick to a needy beggar. Congress at the same time declared that it was going to give Israel better shoes for kicking the beggar.
Then last month, July, the same U.S.Government said it would soon go to war - they used to call the overpowering of weak opponents an expedition - against another "rogue" state. It would strike whenever it pleased. The White House has become skilled at inventing bad names to apply to other nations - terrorists, and rogues, and biological poisoners, and anti-Americans, and even anti-semites.
"War" is itself a bad name. But heads of governments like such "wars" because these give them emergency legal powers weakening human rights and liberties, lets them stir up and rally a reluctant people, squelches the press and the opposition parties, and lends a dramatic effect to their pitiful characters.
We love the United States - but we love it for what it once was, or might be - not for what it is today. We love it for bringing democratic constitutions to Germany, Italy, and Japan. We love it for its progress in fighting ethnic prejudice, invidious discrimination, and racism within its own borders. We love it and its voluntary organizations for the aid they have often given to countries around the globe.
Today the US is a menace to the world. After striving for two hundred years to grow out of its primitive and pretended isolationism, the US now tells the world that it will do whatever it pleases. Externally, as well as domestically, it surges towards a Garrison State.
Most of the world cheered when the Soviet Union withdrew from the horrendous costs of competing with the US as a Superpower. Now we ask anxiously whether that was a good thing. For now the US, as the Sole Superpower, acts as if it will condense and concentrate in its own behavior the evils of the Soviet Union - now you get "Two Evils for the Price of One!"
The next American step, if we read the New York Times, Le Monde, and other news sources, will be a blitzkrieg against Iraq.The ongoing death toll owing to the international sanctions driven by the US against Iraq is 8,000 persons per month, 96,000 a year, in a nation of 23 millions. In proportion to populations, the equivalent in deaths from similar economic sanctions would be 1,152,000 Americans dead from the sanctions. And we all know how America hates to lose a single soldier. But Iraq's 23 million people, hating America and internationalism, increase by leaps and bounds, like many other countries, without the means of raising the young properly. So what kind of world is America breeding? The United Nations, which is finally and just now becoming a true world representative government, discovers that it is about to be cast into the ash heap by the United States. Can it be that the United Nations has begun to perform its job too well to be tolerated by the American elite, plutocrats, isolationists, fundamentalists, and militarists?
Because of fear of Iraq and other Arab states, Israel has long ago developed a military machine second to none in the Middle East. It has
resisted every attempt to control its development of the worst weapon -- the nuclear bomb, and has enough of them to threaten the destruction of the whole of the Middle East. And to wipe Irq off the map -- if the winds did not change diastrously for everyone. All of this could have been prevented by the USA making known what everyone knows anyhow, that the USA would not stand by and let Israel be conquered, even it meant the use of atomic weapons. So we are faced with an unreliable ally possessed of weapons it does not need and that keep the country economically un-viable. Worse, it gives the world the fifth largest exporter of deadly weapons. .
When I say unreliable, I mean that the Israeli govenment is not only unruly in small policies but in the largest questions. Do we really want to trust nuclear weapons by the hundreds to a state some of whose leaders believe that the Nazi holocaust of Jews was the Will of God! It is bad enough that the Jewish enemies, the Arabs, already have presumed such a Divinity, the same, who is said to support the same kind of holy war or Armageddon. Such leaders would be prepared to destroy both their presumed enemies and their own people under conditions of hysterical fear.
Let us move on. We know how the US government has retarded world attempts to control the heating of the atmosphere. Maybe in a few years, hundreds of millions of people, threatened by floods and extreme climatic change, must flee their homes. And President Bush by then will be back at his air-conditioned ranch.
The US government has blocked and delayed many a move on the part of the World to combat racism. But it refuses to see any racism in the conduct of the Israel government. In so doing it frustrates the struggle against racism everywhere. The US takes the position of a man who has learned the one great lesson of his life badly. Racism has almost ruined America in times past. But now it pretends in world forums such as at Durban in Africa that there is no such thing as a racist Jew - by definition.
But only a fool can believe that any person who is discriminated against on grounds of his race must thereby automatically be purified of all racism himself. Racist Jews are common and have to be exposed just like any other racist -- black, Arab, East Asian, or European.
We know also how the United States government has wrecked attempts to bring equal justice into international criminal law. It wants to exempt its own citizens who are charged with crimes in the course of international operations from the compulsory processes of the world criminal courts of justice, while prosecuting other people's criminals.
We know, too, that the United States has spent enough money on armaments alone in the past fifty years to feed, house, clothe, educate, and provide basic medical care to every poor person in the world. The number of these poor has risen from one billion to three billion people meanwhile. And it will increase.
The world knows that all this is very bad. And insulting. It is imperialism, giving the conqueror privileges denied the dominated peoples.
But the World, too, is at fault, because the different nations let themselves be suckers for the myth of Sovereignty, which the US now turns against them. The US cries out for its sovereignty, as if it were Luxembourg. It's like the rich despot who grants that the poor man has a right to a miserable hut, while knowing very well that he can burn down the poor man's hut whenever he feels like it.
America no longer has the allies it could once claim - the United Nations is not in its pocket. The European countries are no longer individual supplicants to the USA. The English government may sometimes behave like the lap-dog of Uncle Sam, but it is trying to be let out into the English garden.
America boasts that it can strike anywhere in the world whenever it pleases. But who wants a strike? What the People of the World want to hear is that America can go wherever people wish it would go, on jobs of mercy, health, education, and democracy. They want to hear, too, that America will arrive carrying not bombs and spies and sanctions, but the makings of a better world. And, if they are not stupefied by the media, they know that what the USA spends every year on its armaments and armed forces could support all the poor of the whole world.
The wretched extremes of the world are worsening. I count here on my paper 46 - forty-six - troubles, all of them being grave problems around the world that are not being properly attacked, not receiving even one-hundredth, not 1%, of what they require of forcefulness, scientific attention and treatment. Each of them needs, too, a hundred times more than the small supply of moral indignation that is furnished it now. I have seen with my own eyes, in my travels to various parts of the world, and I have learned in my studies, too, in the past sixty-five years, the proof of the problems and the proof of their worsening. I need not explain them to you. You who are gathered here know them all quite well -- like the poor child living in a shack knows cockroaches.
If the world is to be made tolerable for all of humanity in the 21st Century, all of these troubles must be attacked at the same time (as they are in fact hopelessly jumbled but together at the present time) World policy must be always and consistently holistic! We cannot do otherwise. No miracle of nature arranges our problems so that they queue up, one at a time, for our convenience in handling them. It is highly doubtful, for instance, that any major world problem can be solved without solving first the problem of the overwhelming growth among the world's poor people. Today's population growth, let us face it, is a terminal disease of mankind.
Not one and certainly not all of the world's problems can be successfully dealt with without a strong world order. Such might be an improved United Nations, so strongly structured and empowered as to redress firmly all of these troubles simultaneously.
People of the World: do not be suckers for sovereignty! Trust in your United Nations. Trust in the European Union. Trust in your international organizations. Trust in the men of good will and high skills, not the militarists and corrupters and aggressors who storm around the world. The world organizations have many faults, but they are the hope of the future. American bombs and American monopolies and the American dollar are not your hope of the future. Nor are the weapons and chauvinists of your own country to be trusted.
Here is the long list of problems in alphabetical order. It will take me over a minute to read it to you:
Probably I have left out other terminal problems. For instance, I have not mentioned the danger to the world from comets and meteoroids. A serious collision with one or another of the uncounted myriads of space objects may have been happening on the average every several hundred years. The Tunguska meteoroid of a century ago came within seconds of destroying the city of St. Petersburg, Capital of Russia. A World Defense Agency should be established to deter or destroy such bodies, and otherwise to repair the destruction they would wreak upon the Earth. Actually, let us make this number 47.
All of the indicators attached to these forty-seven problems are stagnant or declining. The world is not improving or progressing, except for some few people relative to the whole people, and in wasteful practices and life-styles that build up the deceitful Gross World Product index, while actually contributing to the real downturn of all the indicators. The last-gasp utterance of the human race could be "The GWP has never been higher!" And such a finale has a short-term probability many times greater than the probability of encountering an Earth-directed comet.
Every one of the troubles is already more than 70% global and the same global character has come to characterize also the scattered power nuclei -- thousands of governments, non-governmental associations, private and socialist corporations, rich individual adventurers, religious cults, and labor organizations, all operating across boundaries.
The 47 vast troubles can be imagined as a graph. Every country is given a score from good to bad, on a scale of 1 to 10, on each of the 47 items. Then the average world score is 7, the average rich country would score 3, the score of Israel would be 7 and of Palestine 9, the two of them averaging 8, very bad, that is to say, deeply troubled. The life-conditions of Israel and Palestine are worsening just like the rest of the world. And they need the same kind of benefits and discipline that the rich countries can afford to provide and know how to provide if they were properly led. And once this disciplining and providing works for Israel-Palestine, it can begin to work everywhere, and every nation can take heart.
The exercise of many powers has to be built into the new United World Nations System so as to cope with the listed mega-problems. These powers are already being exercised, but eccentrically, and by a generally chaotic, incompetent, violent, greedy, corrupt, fundamentalist, and chauvinistic-ethnic world-governing system.
Globalization can be granted only one respectable meaning: the end user, humanity, should be the authorized beneficiary of all exercises of power. All ideologies, existing structures whether political or not, and all methodologies of handling problems, must bow down before this principle.
Go now to visit the machiavellian realists of the First World, and sometimes elsewhere -- in the Second World (the Arab plutocracies for example) and even the Third World. You will hear diplomats and social theorists and politicians speak of a scarifying scenario for the world that is fast approaching. They speak of it only on rare occasions, and you must have their confidence to be allowed to hear them.
These voices tell us that conditions are becoming impossible for any large population to subsist and work for a better future. One day, and these are my words, a mob psychology will begin to sweep over the world like the bubonic plague, and wherever there is a border of a certain degree of difference in well-being -- 50% to 10,000% -- the poverty-stricken multitude will reach the limit of their breeding and hopes, and in utter desperation and regardless of the immense risks they take, will crash against the barriers of national boundaries.
They will then either destroy sooner or later the country they invade or are permitted to enter, or they will be massacred by the millions.
The disorder that they abandon to flee and the disorder of refusal and mass killings will combine to eliminate a billion or more people from the Earth. Every excuse imaginable will be invented to justify the ethical horror, and this ethical posture is at bottom simply an amoral, because terrified, reaction of self-defense.
Omens and occurrences have been plentiful in recent years. And we can find historical instances. Marius the Roman General exterminated the hundred thousand Cimbri and Teutons who were overrunning the lands of the Roman Republic. Britons of the seventeenth to the nineteenth century witnessed the decimation of Ireland and its peopling with British subjects. North Americans and South Americans of European origin stood by or joined in the extermination of American Indian tribes by the hundreds. Australians exterminated the native people of Tasmania. The Nazis of Germany (with allies among other Europeans), and other countries began the genocide of Jews, Gypsies, and Slavic populations in general. Today, the Le Pen National Front of France today, some Americans along the southern border regions of the USA, agitated elements of the European population, especially Germans, British, Spanish, and French, but also affecting now the generally hospitable Italians, and other nationalities as well -- these all are edging toward stronger methods to block heavy immigration from poor countries.
The genocidal ethnic conflicts of the Balkans and Africa bear suspicious markings of the senseless behavior of masses of people caught up in the flight from doomed local existence. South Korea will suffer this kind of terror when the long- and eagerly awaited peace with North Korea comes and the people of the North see a chance of escape to the South. China and Japan may soon see themselves of one mind with regard to the open spaces of Siberia, Australia and New Zealand. The Hongkong and Taiwan tragedies will have to be played out first. It will not take long.
Along with extra-national mass movement goes internal movement, whether in places such as Ruanda between two peoples hitherto living side by side peaceably if not amicably, or as in former Yugoslavia, or in the unceasing invasion of the cities by the country folk despite every evidence that the urban setting will treat them as cruelly as their home villages and farms.
Increasing disorder within countries and among nations is occurring and may increase exponentially. The mass emigrations become almost like crusades. And we can expect the appeal of the crusade to become part of the agonized tumult. The willingness to die will compete with the willingness to kill, as it is in danger of doing in many places, among which even the Israeli Jewish-Palestinian conflict may be guardedly observed.
A pragmatic, functional, judicious, representative world government is making no progress. What is moving forward is a mood of suppression. What is menacing is a world of Garrison States, rogue states, rampant ethnicism, religious fundamentalism, and countries in political and social chaos. And where there is no will, there is no way.
An extremist solution may be in the offing. It will bring a kind of world government out of its very hatred of other peoples. For, the only way for the rich countries to abstain from the massacre and genocide of the poor populations on the move and to halt their movement may be total suppression at the gates and literally to bombard them with the necessities of life -- the food, materiel, entertainment, medicines, birth control implements, and even the books and films that will keep them in place -measuring out precisely whatever will have to be supplied to arrive at this goal, and cleverly calculating that their consciences will be better served, and their own way of life preserved, it they were to drop bread and entertainment upon the world's poor billions rather than bombs.
This extremist but in a perverted way responsible solution would be also grabbed in the event of mass flights from seashore and river delta areas flooding with the rise of atmospheric temperatures -- global warming. But the 47th problem that I mentioned has several resolutions, all bad, if, without our being prepared for its happening, a rich or poor or typical widespread area of the world is struck from the sky by a meteoroid or comet.
Except for immensely destructive climatic or exo-terrestrial events, the troubles of the world are manageable or unmanageable in relation to the abilities of world leadership. If the world elite, instead of repelling the encroachments of the poor masses by sheer violence, determine to confine them to their native areas and shower down upon them the necessities of life, then the elite can go a big step farther and condition their drops and deposits of goods upon internal reforms. The rich world could allow the poor world to continue its meager existence by designating some one of their own ruling group to be Commissar for every entity or territory into which the world is or may be efficiently divided, and to withhold all assistance from these countries unless and until the ruling powers' advice on the mode of distribution is followed,. If this is a kind of imperialism worse than any other ever experienced by poor countries, so be it. It is infinitely better than a general slaughter. It will undoubtedly, in some cases, lead the population, while being helped to survive, to arrive by itself at such simple solutions to its problems as to reduce population growth to zero or a negative number, to disarm its military, to grow, process and distribute basic foodstuffs for everyone, and to adopt progressive sanitary procedures personally and with respect to the environment.
The picture that I portray is tragedy on a giant scale - the whole human race is involved. What is happening in Israel today - indeed, what has been happening in the Near East for 55 years - is what the military guys like to call "a worst case scenario." I feel that I must go into it. It is taking the largest place in the newspapers and television and Internet screens of the world, if that is a proof of importance. And I must add that our knowledge of what is really the history, and the circumstances, and the everyday happenings, in that region of Israel-Palestine, does not increase with newspaper and TV coverage in America and some other places - but on the contrary, our knowledge decreases as the noise of the media gets louder. The formula for settling the Near East problem is simply to exclaim "This must stop. You, stop! And you, too, stop!" This is the ridiculous so-called "peace process."
Though the people may be kept in ignorance, the elite of the World's Superpower, the USA, with all of its information, is badly confused . Maybe "confused" is too diplomatic a word. Maybe I mean "sick." They are sick people. The American leadership in both major parties is actively promoting ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians while telling them to desist from all armed resistance to their invaders. Like the Israeli leaders, the American leaders claim to see a decisive moral difference between a bomb exploded by hand in a restaurant and a bomb dropped from the sky on a restaurant.
There are two contrasting opinions about the situation in Israel-Palestine:
The first and, unfortunately, dominating opinion holds these views:
1. It is impossible for Jews and Palestinians to live as neighbors
2. Equal justice and opportunities for all people is anyhow an absurd ideal.
3. Israel can end all violence against itself by ruthless force.
4. Every other proposed solution is well- known and is impossible or disastrous.
5. The U.S.A. must back the Israeli government at all costs.
6. Israel is intended by God to be ruler of Palestine.
It is supremely important that you do not accept this position. Those who hold this opinion are preparing their own self-destruction.
The contrasting opinion, which I endorse, can be stated as follows:
1. The situation in Palestine-Israel is a continuing disaster, with no solution in sight.
2. 4 million Palestinians have been rendered helpless, homeless, destitute, and hopeless unless the outside world intervenes.
3. Israel has become a Garrison State (less and less democratic and more and more militaristic). Most Israelis are adversely affected by this trend and deeply disturbed.
4. The USA has been in charge of this situation for 55 years and bungled, meanwhile losing friends all over the world and provoking war and crisis.
5. Gentiles and Jews of the Western World should unite on a just and determined strategy.
Perhaps no useful plan whatsoever can penetrate the cloud of madness that envelops Israel-Palestine. But all the other plans and all the other proposals for peace that have come to my attention amount only to procrastination, games of terror and war, an interminable slow bleeding of 8 million people, an obstacle that bars us from addressing properly many serious world problems of population, ecology, health, employment and education, civil war, terrorism, racism, invidious discrimination, and human rights. These are the costs already of a preoccupation with the Israel-Palestine maelstrom.
These costs of neglecting the world of the Middle East, and indeed the whole world, must be added to the special monetary expenditures that have gone into handling the situation in the Near East, actually, I should say, mishandling the situation. Such extra costs have been estimated, for the USA alone, at about 350 billion euros or dollars, starting back in 1945 and carrying up to the present time. And Congress has just promised Israel more aid. Never mind the prospects of an armageddon. Even if the situation does not worsen, the chances that this agony and mass mischief will continue on their course are disgustingly high.
But let me now advance my principal argument today. I argue that the best solution to the terrible conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine is a radical seizure of authority over the region, by a coalition of powerful concerned nations and international organizations, and the imposition upon Israel and Palestine of a Federal Government over a single territory.
A nation is proposed whose Palestinian citizens will be able to contribute heavily to the modernization of the many Islamic nations of the world, and whose Israeli citizens can assume a leading role in bringing about a world union, with justice, peace and welfare for all.
My plan contains a newly drafted Constitution for the Federation of Israel-Palestine. Like other complete Constitutions, the Constitution that I am offering is a declaration of who is authorized, to decide, and do, what, for whom, when, and with what guiding rules.
I should remind you that neither Israel nor Palestine has a proper constitution.
Israel has not been able to draft for itself a constitution, because of hostilities between secularists and fundamentalists. It has been developing a body of basic legislation, some of it good, some of it bad. But now Israel has become a Garrison State, a state dominated by military elements, restricting individual rights, and aimed at foreign expansion.
Indeed, you might take the same criteria as the Bush U.S. government uses and call Israel a "rogue state." It has violated the UN Charter and treated with contempt a number of reprimands by the United Nations. It has bombed Iraq preemptively. It has transgressed the land of Jordan on occasion, and invaded and occupied Lebanon. It holds territory of Syria. It has sunk a US ship and denied responsibility. It has constructed under the US umbrella a huge military force equipped with enough atom bombs to cause 200 Chernobyls, stealing secrets even from the USA to improve its weapons and to short-cut disliked American actions. It has practically destroyed the Palestinian national structure and subjected a whole people and its thriving society to crushing humiliation and physical ruin. It has been building little Maginot Lines to separate Palestinians from Jews. It occupies hundreds of Palestinian areas, illegally, and settles them with Jews, illegally.
Its citizens and sympathizers, like the Czech-English publisher Robert Maxwell, have been granted in effect what in the early nineteenth century would have been licenses as Privateers, to molest and loot enemy lands and ships, and receive in the end safe haven and honors in the homeland. Israelis and their mostly Jewish American supporters have intervened in American internal affairs in ways which would be intolerable if taken by another government. The Israel secret service and their agents have assassinated enemies located abroad and kidnaped others.
The diamond industry from its early years and international currency dealings from the Diaspora a century before Jesus, two of the most flexible and uncontrollable global businesses, enjoy safe haven and protection from Israel. The horrendous Russian mafia, released from its home ties and bonds, took root in many countries, among which has been Israel, nearby Cyprus and Long Island, New York. The old dream of a communal settlement of Jews in a secular state of Palestine started off with Zionim a century and a half ago, it became mythical, and is as foreign to Israel today as the dream of cowboys-and-Indians in America.
On only one occasion has Israel felt the wrath of the United States. That was when Israel, France, and Great Britain attacked to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt. All three nations, confronted by President Eisenhower's quick, stiff rejection, withdrew their forces and their plan.
Palestine has no deliberate constitution. It is a Dystrocracy, that is, a disordered political aggregate. It is the deliberate policy of the Israeli government to wreck the infrastructure of Palestine, together with its civic and educational centers.
One of the crimes of my profession of Political Science over the past century has been its abandonment of the field of ethics for the exclusive ideal of purely neutral science, more cruelly neutral than even machiavellism. On top of this trend in political science and all other social sciences has been the abandonment of interest in constitutions, ignoring them, although they are the living structures that direct the movements of societies like bones act in the human body. A realistic constitution is the best directive for a people's governance. A good constitution integrates all the parts of a society and adjusts their transactions with each other regularly and smoothly. Accordingly I have prepared a Constitution, which the World should support.
My Constitution proposes a Federation, a federal state of two states, Israel and Palestine. The Israel-Palestine Federation is to cover the full area now occupied by Israel and Palestine. Within this united area, however, the two states are in the beginning culturally separate -- Jewish and Arab. This implies, of course, that there will be religious and ethnic differences between the two States. But they will operate over the whole territory with respect to their own constituent citizens. They govern their Arab and Jewish citizens in important ways, but important limitations are imposed upon them by the Constitution, and the Federal government has several important powers. They are autonomous states; their powers can hardly be taken away from them without their consent. They are ethnic states, for their power to establish a state religion has been taken away.
I shall now try to give you the whole scheme in a single sentence. It is, of course, going to be a very long sentence. Here it is:
* To rescue the Israeli People from a Garrison State,
* and the Palestinians from a Victimized Impotent Authority,
* we would transform both systems into a federated, full democracy,
* in which the Palestinian refugees have returned,
* to a single territory encompassing all of Israel and Palestine,
* whose Federation will consist of the States of Israel and of Palestine,
* each State with equal claim to the full land of Israel-Palestine,
and a population of equal numbers, in a total Federal population that is lawfully maintained at or below ten million persons each,
* each governing its own freely-joined citizens,
* in respect to certain basic functions of law, liberty, and welfare,
* each State electing its own Council of State from single-member,
*equally-populous districts using the approval- voting system,
* with both States mutually counseling, reconciling, and determining matters, by means of a Conference Committee of the two Councils of State,
* an Advisory Senate,
* a Supreme Court,
* a United Nations Temporary Peacekeeping Federal Commission that fades into its indigenous replacement, the Federal Commission,
* with armed forces that are operated at first by the State of Israel,
* and police forces that are operated at first by the State of Palestine,
* and possessing a central bank and common currency,
* and guaranteeing to every inhabitant a decent minimum subsistence,
* plus a federal, mental and physical health delivery system for all,
* plus a universal education system for children and adults,
* plus the freedom to come and go from Israel-Palestine,
* plus the right to own and use personal and business properties,
* plus the right to belong freely to any accepting religion or belief.
Such is the vision of the Federation of Israel-Palestine, FIP.
For such a radical plan to succeed, it must overcome seven challenges:
The first challenge is this: The Plan must be championed by the USA, the Arab League, Turkey, Russia, and the European Union -- which altogether implies UN support. This coalition must be prepared to deliver an ultimatum to the Israel and Palestine governments to accept the plan or else have their countries forcibly sanctioned until they acquiesce.
The American government alone could handle this job. But how can the American government be brought to its senses? This must happen, but how can it happen?
Three things can make it happen. One is the re-education of the 10,000 leading influential persons of the USA, and perforce therefore the several hundred top leaders. Some need only reminders of history, some need counter-pressures, some need brainwashing.
But it is difficult to gain access to their minds. Media controls, heavy political contributions, skilled counsel and management aides, mythology of history and the Bible - guarantee that American leaders can turn a blind eye to the situation in Palestine. About one-third of all political contributions to political campaigns in the United States come from Jewish sources. This presents a problem mainly when the policies of the US and Israel are or should be at odds. Pressures on Jews in America to contribute support to Israeli causes, directly and indirectly, rises as the crisis intensifies. Politicians are often venal, and if they get one-third of their funding from Jews now, why not ask for more and more as the situation of the Israelis becomes more difficult. Between 1930 and 1943, the Nazis and Fascists of Europe were extorting ever greater bribes and pay-offs from Jews to protect them from the continuous details of persecution.
Three per cent of all Americans are Jews and about half of all American Jews would like U.S. Near East policies to change so as to be fair and just and helpful to the Palestinians. But neither these Jews, nor their gentile counterparts, carry great weight when it comes to putting pressures, both subtle and harsh, on politicians and community leaders.
These weighty pressures come for the most part from organizations and well-placed individuals who practice or favor orthodox Judaism and from their hard-nosed professional staffs. The informed and active political and voting behavior of the ordinary Jew, so unlike most gentiles in these regards, tends to back up pro-Israel policies or, what is very important, keep American society from expressing anti-Israel policies.
Jewish organizations are careful to tie the Nazi Holocaust to the fortunes of Israel, and most ordinary Americans have come to believe that Israel is the well-deserved patrimony of the Jews for having suffered the Shoah or Holocaust. And they are led to believe that the Palestinians were in the beginning as scarce as Indians are in the State of Indiana.
I believe that the whole world suffered a kind of holocaust in the years of the 1930s and 1940s. Europe and Africa and Asia were especially affected. But what North America and Australia had to sacrifice to struggle against powerful enemies was also tremendous. And the rich Allies exploited the weak Third World mercilessly to tend to its war machines.
However, let us insist that we must construct a new world, not exhaust ourselves stewing in the garbage of the past.
A united front by the European Union and the European members of NATO, favoring the methods of the Constitution for the Federation of Israel-Palestine proposed here, would affect the American position strongly, especially if the discordance could be brought home to the ordinary American citizen, or even just to the intelligentsia of America. The Israel government realizes this and is trying with its American pro-Israel allies to divide Europe from America and to make friends with Russia.
A third reason why the American government might change its policies is terrorism. The terrors being visited upon the Jews of Israel by Arab bombers and gunners are causing many people to change their political positions. The so-called "war against terror" is expensive and may not be decisively won. Thereupon the western world will carry a continual burden of fear. Under certain conditions, terror can be effective, like it or not.
If the Israel government and its mighty armed forces cannot wipe out Palestinian violence by their own immeasurably greater violence, the game is lost for Israel.
The Jewish people cannot withstand terror without end. It does not matter that the Israel military machine is wrecking Arab Palestine and murdering civilians. Israelis will still be terrorized and unable to carry on worthwhile lives. The government will have to make peace on terms that are increasingly favorable to the Palestinians.
The horrors of the present situation conceivably might release the American government from its constraints, as more and more American Jews and gentiles are consternated. Already, on top of the universal Islamic indignation, there has been a growing anti-Israel feeling in many European and South American countries. By a tacit restraint which is in reality a form of pre-censorship, the worst kind, the movements of attitudes in the USA are not being measured. Anti-Jewish sentiments in Germany have increased by 30% in the past several years. No matter how hard we may seek to contain this sentiment, it is bound to increase the level of anti-semitism in various countries.
It is not anti-semitic to be strongly opposed to the factions that dominate and operate the Israeli government and to those Jews of America and other lands who support these harmful Israeli elements. So long as an honestly concerned citizen of the USA implicates as opponents only those Jews, whether Israelis or American or some other citizenship, who are supporters of the Sharon and kindred Israel policies and government, he is to be applauded, not smeared. The government of Israel, and its foreign supporters, must be defeated.
Let me make myself clear. The United States cannot let Israel fail. Israel must not be engulfed by its enemies. But Israel must be a just nation and, if its people and rulers cannot be just, then Israel must be compelled to be just. And those outside of Israel who support it, acting often like football hooligans, had better assist in the just reconstruction of the country. And at the same time, let them attend to the reconstruction of their other fatherland, America, and the grand Motherland, the Earth.
So, the U.S.A. government may have to bite the bullet, no matter how much it pains some politicians and fundamentalist, machiavellian Jews. Finally, after fifty years, the US must act justly and firmly in Israel and Palestine.
Requirement number 2 for a successful Plan for Israel-Palestine must bring back the Palestinian refugees and their descendants to their homeland. Fifty-five years of humiliation, deprivations, and an alien despotism, have descended on some ten million Palestinians over two generations.
Is this comparable to the Holocaust that brought suffering and death to five million Jews? Some Palestinians have spoken of their own persecution by the Israeli governments as their own holocaust or shoah. One thing is certain - comparisons of this kind are difficult and controversial, but both happenings involve the kind of immense widespread suffering that the world should attend to, and that includes especially the USA.
But let us send a message to the Palestinians -- and it is a message to all traditional religious denominations of the world. "You are a people like other people. You are a people with ancient traditions of conquest, like other people. You have a religion that satisfies you, most of you. But your religion has lost its capacity to work with science and learning and universal humanity. You are greatly in need of restoration of spirit, of rest of soul, of years of therapeutic conversion from helpless hatred to cooperative reconstruction of Palestinian society to greet the future world."
"You need the Israelis. They need you -- to show the world that they are capable of giving care and of helping suffering people to reestablish themselves, as the USA did in Germany and Italy after World War II. Be honest with yourselves. You have little to teach the Jews regarding religion. The Jews have little to teach you. You are both descendants of a main stem religion of the ancient Middle East. You are both part of the great Semitic language group. You even share genes that are uncommon everywhere except among Jews and Arabs. So for your own sakes, as well as the sake of humanity, take the route of reconciliation and reconstruction."
Re-settling two million Palestinians or more is not a net severe hardship, nor even difficult for today's demographers and urban planners. It would cost a small fraction of the money that has been spent until now on armaments and destructive conflict. Moreover, Israel has taken in over the past few years a million Russians who claim a Jewish connection. Very well: with a much expanded territory, in collaboration with the Palestinian part of the Federation, and with American and European help, Israel-Palestine can take in two million Palestinians within the same period of time or less. I have drawn up a basic housing and settlement scheme that can handle such numbers of people well and at a low cost. It is a challenge that a million talented and frustrated Jews of the world, never mind their Palestinian counterparts, would be pleased to take up.
The cap on population which I put earlier at five million Jews and five million Arabs is vital. The Jews are likely to maintain their numbers at a zero growth rate; the Palestinians have a birth rate that doubles their numbers in every generation. Better conditions, new life-styles and dreams, and stiff laws can be relied upon to protect the Jews from being drowned in a human tide. If the zero-growth rate is maintained by both peoples, the problem of equal and mutually adapted peoples will have been solved within the next generation.
Requirement number 3. The Plan must solve the problem of territorial boundaries, and of who can live where.
For half a century, and for a century even before then, Jews and Arabs have struggled over property boundaries, dragging many countries into the conflict. They play a nasty game of chess, now snatching a piece here, now there, now claiming one piece then another, drawing all sorts of maps, scheming and dreaming about all kinds of seizures and purchases and boundary lines, blowing up each other to win a foothold.
This surrealist tragicomedy would largely end, if all the territory were consolidated into one piece, and the people in it could settle wherever they would find a place.
Point 4 is this, and absolutely essential. The rescue plan must resolve the problem of religious fundamentalism, and, in so doing, the problem of the status of Jerusalem.
Like most large cities of the world, Jerusalem is composed mainly of urban sprawl. Its boundaries are crazy and have no necessary connection with the Jerusalem of the ancient Hebrews, or with any other tribe and nation who have ruled the place. The one thing we can be sure of is that a hundred thousand or so Jews and Arabs would like to kill their neighbors as proof of their claim to sacred places in Jerusalem and to win the approval of cruel gods.
The many attempts to decide the boundaries of the city and assign parcels within it to the parties concerned are ultimately nonsensical. There is no city and there should be no city. There is a cultural center, with many holy places and archaeological digs. Let Jerusalem's sprawl be divided into a number of electoral and administrative districts that are integrated into the larger map of Israel.
Let all Israel-Palestine, the whole Federation, be a single metropolis. It is, after all, smaller in numbers than Greater London, the Metropolitan Region of New York, Mexico City and other urbanized regions. Its area is greater than these places and permits a full measure of truck farming. Highly relevant is the promised ability to travel in all directions, so different from the present cramped quarters of everybody.
Let the religious cults have their sacred places. But, where they conflict, let the Federal Government step in and run the site with a commission made up of the representatives of the quarreling cults, and experts at mediation using such techniques as the "Brams-Taylor Win-Win Solution.".
Point number 5 deals with elections. Our plan must also give Israel a workable, representative, election system, and the same to Palestine.
You would think that Jews would be able to govern themselves so well as to design an enviable election system. Not at all. Their election system is an invitation to anarchy and the Garrison State. What the two peoples need is the so-called "Favored Candidate Voting System" working from single-member districts, whereby the voter gives a vote to any and all candidates for office whom he would accept. The candidate who gets the largest total of favorable votes wins. With this method, a party system consisting of liberal and conservative, or conservative and radical, political tendencies should be able to work well.
Challenge number 6 is this: The Constitution must afford every Palestinian and Israeli full human rights and place the Federation under the jurisdiction of the World Court. This would be part of the advancing trend to world government and not an injury to Israeli-Palestinian pride. It would stop the persecution of Palestinians by Israelis and eventually vice versa.
Finally, challenge number 7: The plan must provide for its own transition into real life. That is, we must provide the means by which the present situation can be transformed into a radical and controlled reconstruction. This I have done in the Constitution. If the two authorities of Israel and Palestine do not agree to submit to this just demand, a Commission selected by the United Nations and the Coalition of Nations must take charge of the whole country. Then they must carry out the steps called for by the Constitution. In such a case, within several years, the Commission could turn over its offices and powers to the constitutionally elected representatives of the Israelis and Palestinians.
These, then, are seven challenges to the Plan, with the methods that I would propose for dealing with them.
So now I must leave you with a distressing picture of the present, and a menacing prospect of the future. I leave you, also, with a constructive Federal Democracy of Israel and Palestine -- a plan that will probably be torn to pieces with other good things. I cannot imagine a more incompetent and odd couple to be in charge of this situation than George Bush and Ariel Sharon. So you had better take charge.
Meanwhile, standing by passively and foolishly, we are assaulted by words of Shakespeare, uttered in the nasal plaint of Bush and the guttural voice of Sharon:
"Cry Havocke and let slip the Dogges of Warre!"
"Cry Havocke and let slip the Dogges of Warre!"
And yet we continue to stand back.
I named 47 severe world problems. Of these, 43 - that is, all but three - are part of the chaos and degradation of Israel-Palestine. The World, not the United States, must tackle and solve the Near East problem. And then the world could march upon the rest of the troubles -- in good conscience and tested competence.
You can understand me, therefore, when I say, that our ability to cope with the world of the future has a direct relationship to our ability to cope with the situation in the Near East.
Whether you come from New Zealand or Kamchatka or Ecuador, I pray that you and your colleagues of the organized World of the Future will take these problems in hand.
Our own shout will defy the Havocke created by Bush and Sharon:
"Cheers for a World of One and All!"
"Cheers for a World of One and All!"
The text of this address by Professor Alfred de Grazia and also its sources and substantiation are carried and linked at <www.grazian-archive.com> Attention is called to the availability to the public from the same internet site of a cd-rom containing all of the works of Alfred de Grazia on "Governing the World," with a concordance indexing every word of the multi-volume corpus in its context.
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