spinbadz own

More often than not the aim of war is to win territory. Borders tend to change - one way or another - in the face of aggressive campaigns.

Hence the Ottoman boundaries in the Middle East disappeared following the defeat of Turkey in WW1. The countries carved out of the area by the French and the British in 1918 have, by and large, survived to the present day.

In the 1930s and 40s the map of Europe changed in the face of Hitler's WW2 advance, and was then restored by the Allies' successful counter, culminating in the division of Germany into East and West after the war.

That division of Germany is now as passe as Mesopotamia, Siam and Gaul, all of which loomed large on human maps at various times over thousands of years.

In a philosophical sense national borders are but creations of our imagination, as is the very concept of "country" itself.

So arguments purporting ultimate truth in such matters can be obscene, often inspiring futile and bloody battles. Fairness, reasonableness and good-heartedness are not simply esoteric ideals but, I believe, ultimately very helpful in the serious business of divvying up this planet we all share.

Bigotry and chauvinism would not seem to be great assistants in this regard. Not if the aim is peace.

This little meandering is prompted by the range of reactions to Israeli PM Sharon's announced intention to shrink his country - again - this time out of the Gaza Strip and most of the West Bank.

Remember that it was Sharon's Likud Party, which the New York Times' James Bennett helpfully described recently as a "bulwark for Greater Israel", which ceded the Sinai peninsula (an oil-rich desert area larger than Israel itself) to Anwar Sadat-led Egypt 25 years ago.

A more extreme reaction than Bennett's, as always, is the latest instalment of hate-Israel/ hate-America spittle by rabid propagandist Robert Fisk.

Fisk describes US President Bush, a commender and backer of Sharon's plan, as a "most dangerous man" , ("...a thief?...a criminal?") as well as a "gutless, cowardly" wilfiul and boring liar who's "lunacy and weakness " make him "more frightened of the Israeli lobby (both the Jewish "cabal" and the "Christian Sundie" fundamentalists) than he is of his own electorate", and who connives to use Iraqis as "sandbags" in a "firing line".

For a short article (written before the Rantisi assassination) that might seem like an amazingly obtuse tirade, but it is typical of Fisk.

The issue at hand is indeed Sharon and Israel. The references to Iraq, one suspects, are merely to help the reader see the bigger Bush-as-criminal /idiot-picture that looms so large (and menacingly/stupidly, but never contradictorily) in Fiskworld.

The Gaza withdrawal itself is only fleetingly mentioned by the writer as "puny". He instead castigates, with more adjectives than I can sensibly cram into this sentence, the "prepostorous demands" of "colonial" Israel & "Sharon's plan to steal yet more Palestinian land, (in fact) ...(v)ast areas" of the West Bank.

Then he likens Bush's endorsement thereof to resurrecting (now, in 2004) the various Nazi landgrabs and the former European colonizations around the globe over hundreds of years.

We may as well give the Netherlands to Spain, and Egypt and America to Britain. So says Fisk.

In one fell swoop this "yellow-streak"ed US President, he claims, has justified terrorism, boosted Bin Laden's recruitment drive and destroyed US credibility as a middle-man.

From here on in, says Mr Fisk, everyone who loses life or limb (from terrorism anywhere, one assumes) has Bush to blame.

And the reason the US President done this horrible thing (of, keep in mind, applauding Sharon for wanting to move completely out of Gaza and out of most of the West Bank)?

Because, claims Fisk, he is a Christian Zionist fanatic who endorses Sharon because of the belief that "the state of Israel must exist there according to Gd's law until the second coming.......I kid thee not!"

When you open a newspaper like "The Guardian" or Fisk's"The Independent", drooling bigotry like this pours out in synch with that tired leftish formula: Israel and the United States as the arch-enemies of mankind, Ariel Sharon as the devil incarnate, Palestinians the perennial victims, and anyone opposing the aforementioned bad guys as automatic good guys and current victims.

Jews are fine so long as they hate Israel but if they support Israel they are dogs deserving of slow death.

And, of course, capitalism sucks. (Well, maybe not, at least to some extent, European capitalism...)

Test the Fisk paradigm by slotting in the recent news that 68 innocent people, many of them in a targeted busload of schoolchildren, were massacred by a series of exploding lemming attacks in Iraq.

You will find no emphasis, for example, that the exploding lemmings themselves must surely have been convinced - possibly by apparently wise and trustworthy bearded fellows - that they were to be rewarded with virgins in heaven for their holy murderous actions.

That the said bearded fellows are all about using force, intimidation and barbaric spectacle. To achieve, apparently, hegemonic power - world hegemonic power.

That they regard the people they mass murder along the way as mere political pawns necessarily sacrificed in the name of their version of Allah. How weak is America for lamenting the loss of human life, they chuckle.

Slot this news story into the Guardian paradigm and you will find no analytical treatment of the possibility that but for such kind of intimidation this brand of demented fanatical belief has given and offers the world not a stitch.

No role model society, no technological or economic or social clout, no leadership in just and popular endeavours. Just the crude, trogladite threat to relieve the world of both the "Pax" and the "Americana" in Pax Americana, as well as the democratic and libertarian ideals that underscore it; such relief to be achieved the only way it can: by bypassing the voluntary marketplace of popular ideas in which the American brand of democracy has thrived,

Instead of such irrelevant digression (regarding the news about the 68 slaughtered innocents) the denizens of newspaper far leftism get to the meat of things as they see it:

That the loss of 68 lives was the fault of one G. W. Bush. That fanatics are never (or rarely) responsible for their own actions. That the "brutal American occupation" of Iraq makes them understandably upset.

And Bush's support of Sharon's terrible plan to withdraw from Palestinian territories is intolerable.

So instead of righteously castigating a fanatical belief system that presents a direct, actual and constant threat to the average person in almost any street anywhere, Robert Fisk of the Independent instead pokes malicious fun at the Christian Zionists, who in his perception control the US President like a puppet on a string.

Never mind that President Bush, like all US Presidents, believes in and adheres to the rigid American constitutional necessity of separating church and state.

Never mind that the current President has stressed repeatedly the hope that the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza will prompt Palestinians to build a prosperous Mediterrannean resort there instead of a launching pad for murder and mass-murder attacks. Including those same Palestinians who were wildly and happily cheering after the 9/11 attacks.

Sharon first had contact with Bush in 1998, as George Will points out, when the then-governor of Texas accompanied him on a helicopter tour of the Israel's vulnerabilities and saw the place where Israel, from 1949 until 1967, had been nine miles wide ( "Why, in Texas we have driveways longer than that" ).

Fisk is or ought to be well aware that it was in that context that Bush referred to a realistic solution involving Israel keeping parts of the West Bank. That previous US Presidents adopted the same position. That in any case Bush said that nothing Israel does now affects final status negotiations.

That in accordance with the "international law" that Fisk cites so piously, famous UN Resolution 242 (passed after the 1967 Six Day War), required the withdrawal of Israel "from territories occupied in the recent conflict." Not from "the" territories. Israel insisted on deletion of the "the" because it implied, as Arab and other powers acknowledged by vehement opposition to the deletion -- withdrawal from all territories.

Bush does not talk plain English, in Fisk's view. He supports Sharon's plan only because of the evil Jewish "cabal" on the one hand, and the Christian perception of Armageddon and Rapture on the other.

Forget that President Bush has raised record-breaking levels of campaign funds from a wide range of corporate and individual sources, only a small percentage of whom might even be loosely affiliated with those two, err, "groups".

Forget that a US President has tremendous independent powers and Bush would not stand a chance of election, let alone re-election, if he was or was perceived as a meek follower under the thumb of any kind of warped sectional interest.

Forget that Bush won plaudits throughout an unprecedentedly (that's right) successful gubernatorial political career as a unifier and a man with great powers of outreach; George W. Bush was the only governor to achieve re-election in the history of the state of Texas.

You have to forget all of that to appreciate the Fiskworld experience, where George W. & co. are bad guys plain and simple, and anything they do is wrong.

Including trying to take a step towards a just two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians a la the latest Sharon move.

As I mentioned at the beginning, I believe it is intellectually appalling try to argue, as Fisk perennially does, that "true" ownership of Palestine lies with the Arabs. The Jewish arguments are also very compelling. Jews certainly believe them to be valid and are also willing to die for their own principles. They have, indeed, already done so in numerous wars and continue to do so at present.

The condition of being "Jewish" is certainly a very real identificant, one that has been the object of mistreatment when in stateless condition, and one that is tied up　with the view of being worthy of self-determination and having a nexus with the Middle East in that respect.

Huge numbers of Jews were also forced to migrate to Israel from the Arab world until 1948, just as many Arabs were forced to leave Israel so many years ago.

While over a million Arabs live in Israel today (that is, in Israel itself, exclusive of the West Bank and Gaza) very few Jews are presently able to live anywhere in the Arab world.

And the entire region of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank is a tiny area. That is why fairness and a non-violent attitude amongst the people living there is so important. All peoples can achieve happy lives if they focus on the difficult business of state building for themselves, instead of the emotionally easy extensions of envy: dehumanising, blaming and seeking to destroy others.

We can be encouraged that many Arabs may also be open to a reasonable and just two-state solution, considering the point made by Walter Mead in today's Bush is Bad News that:

"In Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey and other countries, the large majority of people I spoke with are ready to tolerate the Jewish state - most even understand that the final boundaries of Israel will include some of the heavily settled areas beyond the pre-1967 borders. They also understand that few if any Palestinians will return to the homes they lost after the war that erupted when Israel declared its independence in 1948."

If this is true, which I hope it is. It may be a stretch, considering the worldview entertained by many in the media and as discussed hereinabove. But the media must sell product, and perhaps people everywhere are not so ignorant of that. What would a fringe-dwelling propagandist have to hate and to write about if peace were to break out?

If one is to look seriously at peaceful solutions, something along the lines of that described by Mead - and initiated by Sharon- is all that is viable.