"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed"
Dwight David Eisenhower

Why pick out Israel of all the nations of the world, to devote an essay? For the reason that Israel has absorbed such an inordinate part of our foreign and military aid and the discussion of the fortunes of Israel outstrips all other interests, including that of our former adversary, Russia. The United States and Israel seemed locked in a dance of mutual dependence, theirs a matter of perceived survival, ours a power-base in the middle east as well as our significant Jewish population. It is right and natural that this relationship exist. Yet peace in this area of the world is as elusive and fragile as the third world and our efforts in support of reconciliation might have been better directed. Once again, we have let the armaments trade dictate the direction of human strivings. The gun, the gun above all else.

Israel was created out of the whole-cloth of Palestinian lands and taken from them by forces half a world away. That is a fact. And yet the Palestinians share this fate with all the nations of the world, whose lands were once taken and borders once redrawn by conflict, whose final settlement may not yet be final, and who are where they are by force of arms. It's an ancient history of conflict, this naming of France by French, the United States by Americans, the list endless and always someone thrown out, displaced and absorbed or made refugee. Always the powerless by the powerful and Israel will not be given back, not at least in its original configuration.

The Palestinians have been consigned by fate and the powers of the world to camps and shantytowns at the fringes of their heritage, which is a heritage no more. Their plight foments the bitterness of their Arab brothers, makes that part of the world endlessly dangerous and exacerbates the division of Muslim, Christian and Jewish culture. We arm both sides and are caught by surprise when those arms are used, continuing the myth that peace may be achieved by the balanced power of arms.

And thus the Jews of the world have fled the police-states and oppression of the world to build a police-state nation on the backs of another oppressed people, who have seen their homes and businesses, their livelihood and culture erased, left to beg at the edges of their lands.

I accept that our support of Israel has been the lesser of evils, but name it evil. I accept that to turn back or turn away would be no less possible than returning America to the Indians or England to the Germanic tribes. The world is far from just, but it is the world and we do what we can, sometimes more than we can, sometimes not as much as we can.

But would not the middle east be a more stable environment if a portion of the armament money had been spent in building? Would it not ease the wrong to have helped build a Palestinian economy? Is that so far from a humanistic direction, so detached from the possibilities of our minds? Palestine finally exists again. Forty years after the effort might better have been made, there is opportunity to build schools and factories, businesses and cities, planned not on a western model of what we think should be, but on a Muslim vision of what could be.

Peace is never permanently established at the point of a sword. Hatreds are not erased by curfews and quotas. The thirst for education and economic progress is not quenched by endless decades of subservience. Hopelessness is the father and religious belief the mother of terrorism.

I know that Israel has spent its life with its back to the wall, surrounded by dangers. And yet I have been disappointed at the ease with which the oppressed become oppressors. The Jews have sent the word never again across the world and rightly so. But never again for whom? Is there no remembrance of being shut off and shut out, stripped and disenfranchised that carries over to the Palestinians, the Kurds, the Bosnians and others? Where is the Jewish voice when "ethnic cleansing" becomes a principal once again in the world? The camps at Auschwitz and Berkenau are not all that far from other camps and other suffering and other peoples.

Persecution needs a voice and whose is better than the Jews? Democracy needs a voice and whose is better than America? Humanity needs a voice and whose is better than all of us who claim a heritage as human?

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