You know how,when someone commits a crime, investigators will look into that person’s background, especially their childhood, to see if there is something that can explain the terrible behavior?  Conservatives are usually against this, associating it with being “soft on crime”.  But they would probably accept it – even embrace it – in the case of Israel.

Here is a people that more than any other has been persecuted. Persecuted for two millennia!  That’s the equivalent of living in a slum and having a father that beats you all the time and a mother who drinks.

With all that, no people on earth is more attuned to psychology, so how come Israel insists on bullying its neighbors?
I guess it’s like when the French say: “chausseur plus mal chaussee”, the shoemaker has the worst shoes.  But thinking about this might make it easier for Jews all over the world to accept the fact that the Israelis rather than sympathy, need reeducating, and tell their kinfolk they’re in the wrong.

The U.S. claims the right to do everything from incarcerating people without charges to waging all-out war, in the name of self-defense.  Israel claims the right to bomb a country back fifteen years in the name of self-defense.

In the early days of Israeli hubris, it claimed that it was a tiny country surrounded by enemies.  Then it built a wall. The U.S. is a big country surrounded by water, it was indignant over the Berlin Wall, but now it too builds walls where it can.

Increasingly, there is a sense that Israel and the U.S. are like a rich parent indulging a spoiled kid.  When kids make enemies in the school yard, parents tell them to “be nice”.  When kids move into a new neighborhood, parents tell them to try to make friends.

The Jews who came to Palestine in 1946 were the survivors of the original ethnic cleansing operation (followed, alas, by many more).  They needed a refuge, they wanted their own state.  Unfortunately, the world community  didn’t separate the need for a refuge and the legitimate desire for a state from a religiously inspired yearning: “Next year in Jerusalem”, the toast of every Jewish family at Passover. It gave in to the Jewish demand for a state IN PALESTINE.

In order for that to work, as much attention would have had to be paid to the sensitivities of the Palestinians as to developing the part of Palestine allotted by the U.N. to the Jews.

When the Israeli government dropped leaflets warning Lebanese citizens to evacuate before a bombing, it was continuing a method begun right after partition.  For years, Israel claimed this was not true, that the Palestinians had fled because “the Mufti of Jerusalem told them to”.  Recently declassified documents prove that most of the Palestinians who fled and never regained their homes did so because they were warned by the Israelis of impending attacks, and indeed many of those who didn’t flee were killed.

Many Israeli refugees were highly qualified people who could have offered their knowledge and skills to their neighbors instead of looking down upon them.

Similarly, the United States could have used the United Nations it helped found to lead efforts to reach a common ground toward development, instead of threatening first the Communists, and now the Islamists, who have different ideas about how people should live.

The result is that now we have Big Daddy U.S. using his Kid Israel to help in the  “fight against terrorism” -  telling them that what they’re doing is right, like African warlords using child soldiers.

In its nine-thirty headlines, CNN announced that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has challenged President George W. Bush to a televised debate.  Watch to see whether the media tries to bury this story.

If it doesn’t,what fun!  Our President is a lot younger, and more fit, than Mike Wallace, who made Ahmadinejad look like the Red Baron when he thought he could show him up to be either some kind of devil or ignoramus.  What a way to end a career!

For five years, thinking Americans have been feeling like the parents of a monumental underachiever at the yearly school recital, cringing at the impression their president makes on his foreign peers – and their peoples.

Forget being totally unprepared for Katrina!  The White House phones must all be busy, in the search for  a device that could be installed under the president’s (bulletproof) vest and that would deliver him the the magic bullet (sic): the ability to respond to the highly articulate and  intelligent Iranian president.  Just being seen together with him may remind audiences that it’s Ahmadinejad the rest of the masculine world has copied by dispensing with their neckties.

Usually, this is the cry of the citizen disgusted with the behavior of his elected representatives.  But what about the media?  How can the pundits continue to discuss the ins and outs of the war in Iraq – or in Lebanon – without ever mentioning oil? This morning, one talk show host – I think it was Chris Matthews – mentioned the fact that there are all those books out there divulging terrible things.  But he didn’t say what.  He didn’t say any of the things Pulitzer and other prize winners have been writing about, such as the fear of oil having or about to peak, or the one percent doctrine that we have to act like the Gestapo if there is even a one percent chance that someone, somewhere, might get nuclear or biological weapons.

I guess the media is afraid that if they get it all out there where everyone, and not just book readers, can hear it, they won’t have anything left to talk about – or that they’ll lose the opportunity to hold forth and get paid handsomely for it – by those of us  who buy the products they advertise.

Raed Jarrar (raedinthemiddle.com), an Arab-American who was prevented from getting on a U.S. plane in the U.S. because he was searing a T-shirt with an bi-lingual expression that read: “they will not silence us” did make it from “Democracy Now” to CNN.  But the anchor seemed sorry when Jarrar told him that everyone doesn’t define a terrorist in the same way, going on to say that for many, a state that bombs women and children is a terrorist.  At least they didn’t cut him off.

But this brings me to the real subject of this post: The “World Can’t Wait” campaign to bring down the entire Bush administration.  They rightly point out that under Hitler, many Germans thought they didn’t have to worry about atrocities because they were not among those targeted, until finally, it was their turn.  The WCW campaign is a valiant grass roots effort to wake up the American people to what is being perpetrated in their name.  Even if you don’t agree with their belief that nothing short of revolution can turn this country around, you should ask yourself what difference there is between German Fascism and the goals and methods of our government.  The goal is clearly to bring the entire world into line, and with the pretext that some out there may resort to apocalyptic violence to prevent that from happening, we are getting ready to do just that ourselves.

Regarding  another terrorist attack against the U.S., the question was “not if, but when”; as for the war on Iraq it was “not if but under what pretext”; and with respect to the coming war against Iran it’s “my place or yours?” : whether the Israelis will take out the nuclear sites or we shall.  Both countries have the means to do so, if it can be done.

With hindsight, it turns out the draconian Treaty of Versailles had something to do with the rise of Hitler.  The Germans didn’t just decide to let a madman lose on the world.  (People’s rarely do such things, even if they invariably  get the government they deserve.)

We (“the People”) should be asking our journalists to “dig deeper” into the reasons why so many ordinary human beings hate us.

I knew there was something I was forgetting yesterday.  Here’s a quote from the latest New Yorker Shouts and Murmurs: “Tehran, Iran, (July 29) – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has ordered government and cultural bodies to use modified Persian words to replace foreign words that have crept into the language such as “pizzas”, which will now be known as “elastic loaves”. – Associated Press”

Here indeed is a precious clue to what the future holds!  When Charles De Gaulle did the same thing in France – going so far as to entrust the prestigious Academie Francaise, guardian of the French language, with finding properly French equivalents for foreign words that had crept into the language of Moliere and Voltaire, it was to try to recapture the past glory such centuries’ dead writers embodied.  As heir to the even more ancient Persian culture, Ahmadinejad is clearly signaling his intention to capture future glory for his people. Like us, he’s forgetting the Chinese.

Here’s today’s mystery: will the future be a conflict between the various fundamentalists of the Book, or between Islam and a state capitalism claiming roots in Confucius?

Today’s irony:  If you weren’t aware of it before, you know by now that the Israeli army is a people’s army: otherwise, they wouldn’t be going on camera complaining of the way their superiors ran the recent war.  (Also, in this country of 6 million, everyone knows everyone else..)  But it seems clear that defective leadership is not the only reason why the Israeli army cannot fight as well as the Lebanese people’s army (Hezbollah): both are fighting for their land, but Hezbollah recruits don’t need to be told contorted rationalizations why it is their land, whereas the Israeli soldiers do.  Those who are defending their land from the gut always win over those who are defending it from the head.

P.S. Defective Israeli leadership also has a lot to do with the fact that Israel’s case is a rationalization.  The first generation, for whom the Holocaust and settlement were a reality, is gone.  The second will choose an opportune moment to take former Prime Minister Sharon off life-support, but it cannot instill in today’s Israelis the flame that made their elders think, in defiance of every religious morality, that two wrongs could make a right.

P.P.S. CNN replayed yesterday’s presidential press conference with the intent of minimizing the terrible impression it made to see George Bush joking as he talked about the need to continue sacrificing lives to the “war on terror”.  Shameful.

Reading a five-week old Economist special section on Pakistan, a picture is formed in my mind’s eye: American, Israeli and Pakistani government troops, each in their respective theaters of war, demolishing houses, jailing people, including children, at random, until the alleged culprit is handed over.  In the case of Pakistan, the article is referring to “a powerful civil servant, known as the political agent, whose duty is to keep the tribes quiet.  He has a pot of cash to reward good behavior and little need to account for his actions.  His main power is to exact collective punishment.”

Senator McCain, on “Meet the Press”, won’t rule out military action against Iran; no wonder it is rumored he could run with Jeb Bush as vice-presidential candidate.  Happily (so to speak) a Senator with a Jewish name, Diane Feinstein, isn’t afraid to tell Wolf Blitzer that the problems of the Middle East won’t be solved until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is resolved.  Bravo Senator Feinstein.  I thought something like this would never happen.