The Diplomacy of Buffoons

Condoleezza Rice talking in a closed system expresses sympathy for the death of a college student, general concern about the treatment of the citizens of Gaza and about deaths of Palestinian citizens. But it's generalized. Specific about an Israeli student, but not for the baby killed by the Israelis as collateral damage?

Not for two farmers killed in their fields last week when a tank artillery shell was fired. Collateral damage? Or perhaps Israel's high-tech version of the Kassams falling on Sderot? You can have bad intelligence or you can fire just to scare the hell out of the farmers, or you can fire off your homemade rockets and keep your fingers crossed that they will kill someone. Either way, who cares about really trying to figure out how to stop the violence on either side?

And then the final absurdity: the rockets must stop, she says, they must stop. So who is she going to talk to? She who immediately condemned Hamas when they won the elections and became the elected majority party of Gaza and the Occupied Territories. She who announced that Hamas was a terrorist organization so we don't deal with them. She who supported the Israeli withholding of funds legitimately due to the Palestinian government in the beginning of the collective punishment? She who failed to consider even talking to Hamas indirectly when they made back channel overtures and indeed even unilaterally ceased fire in the subtle hope that it might convince the Israelis and the US and the EU to recognize them and start just to talk?

Perhaps she thinks that even though Fatah is not in Gaza, but is in the Occupied Territories that Fatah can stop the rockets? Who stops the rockets? Can anyone? When she says the rockets must stop, who is she expecting to stop them? God? Does she ever think that the only way to stop them is to try to talk to the ones who are firing them?

This is the mind set that is equal to the passive voice, the disembodied sentences with no agents, the child in a Bill Cosby monologue that insists that "it broke." This is the voice of the esteemed citizen just stopped for speeding, "Don't you know who I am? Don't you know who is talking to you?"

Were it not so tragic, one could laugh uproariously at this madness, this diplomacy of buffoons. This is Bergson's definition of the comic: the rigid personality persisting in behavior despite the knowledge that her demand will not be listened to. The rockets must stop. If this is not a clear indication that as much as we loathe them we must talk to our enemies, then I don't know what further example is needed.

She will continue to make demands to the clouds, to the trees, to the stones. They are more liable to answer than Hamas or vengeful splinter groups in Gaza who fire the rockets in retaliation.

And while I am at it, the Kassam rockets—homemade, inaccurate, wounding or killing almost at random since they make it in the general direction of a town—they are the warfare of buffoons on the other side, people who cut off noses to spite their face. They are the gang that cannot shoot straight because they do not have the technology. They are the jerry-rigged terrorists.


These Kassams are opposed to Israel's almost accurate missile assassinations. I say almost accurate because they strike the targeted vans, or perhaps they hit an apartment in which the intended victims were thought to be, but might have left—during the moment between the intelligence and the button pushing the trigger pulling, but it just happens to kill some women and babies as “collateral damage” . . . ah yes, collateral damage, the cowardly euphemism that allows us not to give that techno-beast its proper name: state-sponsored terrorism.

Kabuki Show at Naval Academy

When I was an Insurance person, one of the things I learned was that when you have a big shindig coming up, you plan it out with plenty of time. All these many weeks I have been waiting to get information about when the Annapolis Conference on Israel and Palestine would be held. Not that I am a prospective invitee, of course, but just so I could KNOW.

Finally, today, I read a piece in Reuters that says that the conference will be held on the 27^th of November (next Tuesday) with meetings the days before and after. If anyone I know in business had decided to call a conference of that magnitude a week before the conference, they would have been lucky if one of the principle invitees showed up. How long has this been going on? Since Bush made a speech back on July 16, 2007. This is the responsibility of the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, and she has “funked it.” Badly. In business, she'd get fired or be put on probation.

But note how Reuters reports it: the US said on Tuesday it “has told other nations it will soon send out invitations to the Middle East peace conference it plans to hold in Annapolis, Maryland, but none have gone out yet.” When are they going to send them? Wednesday? Thanksgiving? (Maybe some undocumented alien in the State Department can work all day Thanksgiving to prepare the FedEx packages so the invitations get there by Saturday. After all, she or he is not a real Amurcan and really doesn't need to celebrate Thanksgiving, right?)

In a larger context, of course, the conference has long been seen as a Kabuki Dance, with no real intention on the part of Israel to make any concessions and to stop their illegal expansion of the settlements in the Occupied Territories. Take the report of a prior planning meeting that appeared in the Los Angeles Times on October 19, 2007. Rice left the Mideast after a meeting in Jerusalem after having “shot down the primary Palestinian demands after several days of back-and-forth meetings with Israeli and Palestinian Authority leaders.” (p. A4) Her visit was so bland that it barely received coverage, and an editorial in Ma'ariv quoted by the LAT said “she made it clear that she in fact agrees with most of Jerusalem's demands.” (ibid.)

“During Rice's visit, Palestinian officials took every opportunity to publicly list the issues they wanted addressed before the conference: Palestinian prisoners, the borders of a future Palestinian state, the West Bank barrier being constructed by the Israelis, as well as refugees and Jerusalem.” (ibid, loc.cit.) I'm not Palestinian, but I could add to that a time line for withdrawal and the dismantling of the settlements. No, Rice and her entourage “rarely, if ever” referred to those items, preferring to speak of “core issues”(ibid.) So you can see, the fix is probably in, and the Palestinians will get a ride on the merry go round to nowhere once again.

Rice and Tony Blair, now the international envoy to Israel and Palestine, passed through the separation wall and visited Bethlehem. Sam Bahour, the Palestinian-American businessman and developer, who runs an email service giving news about the Palestinian side of the struggle once or twice a week, was quoted in the Financial Times as saying after the visit: “These moves are not unimportant but I don't want us just to become a university for people to learn how bad things are in Palestine. Palestinians are beyond statements. The Palestinian reality is overwhelming any real hope.”

Syria may or may not come. They have been marginalized, of course, and they know they have a target on their back and are in the rifle sights of the neo-cons. I saw a travel ad in the Los Angeles Times monthly magazine this past Sunday (actually a slick hundred plus pages of advertisements for the West side beautiful people—party hosts, snazzy law firms to hire, slinky models and French fashions. And, oh yes, the crossword puzzle, which everyone use to look forward to doing every week). The ad was of a cowboy in Israel. Yep, the cowboy and his family work a cattle ranch—and the grassy plains and hills in the background make you wonder—where is this? Not out in the desert. Not near the Jordan River. Nope, on the Golan Heights, don't you know, which obviously Israel has now settled. I wonder what the cowboy and his family will do if Israel ever negotiates with Syria to give the Golan Heights back? What's that you say, annexation of territory gained during war is illegal? Well, who cares, pardner, this is Israel!

So there is something to watch the week after Thanksgiving, the Kabuki dance in Annapolis. It will make the news and take your eyes off what going on down in Venezuela.

Venezuela? Yes, according to the press, Chavez is about to take over the country as a real dictator, and there is a popular uprising, a lot of opposition. It's all bullshit. More on that later. There's a real chance that another coup is in the offing. Just a hunch.