Informed Speculation

You’ve been wronged, it is true; land that you thought was yours was taken from you, in a partition scheme that ended the way most partition schemes do: badly.  You have sinned against Israel and it has sinned against you. You must understand, however, that the road to redemption doesn’t pass through the valley of retribution.  You must learn to put your trust in leaders who will build your nation alongside Israel and quit seeking the never-to-be-achieved ‘right of return’.  Most of all, you must renounce your endless war that can never be won.

On November 19, 1863, the greatest president spoke at the cemetary of the dead of Gettysburg, and made a stirring address that has echoed through the ages.  Less well known is the speech by the day’s main speaker, Edward Everett, who was considered an orator without peer in his day.  Lincoln’s speech is far the better, for its universality as well as its brevity, but Everett’s has a passage that surely resonates during the current crisis:

…[T]hat gracious Providence which overrules all things for the best, “from seeming evil still educing good,” has so constituted our natures, that the violent excitement of the passions in one direction is generally followed by a reaction in an opposite direction, and the sooner for the violence. If it were not so, if injuries inflicted and retaliated of necessity led to new retaliations, with forever accumulating compound interest of revenge, then the world, thousands of years ago, would have been turned into an earthly hell, and the nations of the earth would have been resolved into clans of furies and demons, each forever warring with his neighbor. But it is not so; all history teaches a different lesson. 

The Middle East is the land to prove Everett wrong, if ever there was one; but I believe him to be right.  You cannot defeat Israel, and the longer you deny that obvious fact, the longer you prolong the misery of your people…