P.O. Box 1745
KFUPM
Dhahran 31261
Saudi Arabia
The President of the US
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
June 4, 2011
Dear Mr. President,
Greetings again. I am the writer of a May 19 fax and email expressing my distress that Dominique Strauss Kahn was in prison, ending with the following plea to you that something be done so that he not have to spend more nights in his cell on Reiker's Island.
"Would George Washington have put General Lafayette in New York prison if he had been a little bit "French" and over gallant with the ladies at a cotillion at Mount Vernon? Come on!
...You ran on "cosmopolitanism." Please intervene: maybe even make a visit to DSK in prison so that they would treat him a little better, at least."
They did treat him a little better, whether because of my fax or my prayers, or something the White House did; he is now awaiting trial in a comfortable place and the media has moved on to other things.
Nevertheless, the discovery that I could send messages to you, has encouraged me to pass on to you some "remarks to the younger generation," as I am sort of a dinosaur, having actually been alive (in the US) during the 1967 events, and in their aftermath (in Lebanon and Egypt) which you mentioned in your "67 borders with swaps" speech to the State Department employees.
In response to your "swaps," Natanyahu used the word "indefensible" for the 1967 borders. I woiuld agree that Abba Eban's lies, during the televised UN debates during the 1967 war, to rationalise Israel's grasping of the West Bank from Jordan were, indeed indefensible arguments. It is good that Natanyahu reminded us, obliquely, as does UN resolution 242, that Israel's land grab in 1967 was indefensible. Of course Natanyahu didn't mean that he agreed that Abba Eban made a false, "indefensible" argument at the UN. He meant "undefendable-not able to be defended"--to him, unless the seacoast and farmland of Israel has a land buffer, with settlements, in the occupied West Bank, it is is not able to defend itself from all the weaponry which President Assad of Syria, the Military Care-taker government of Egypt, and King Abdullah of Jordan are known to have.
As for your use of "swaps," --though it is nice and American, and seems to come right out of Mark Twain's, "Tom Sawyer," ---there is nothing left for the Palestinians to swap! What they had--the five hundred agricultural villages, the whole system of rain catching systems, of organic irrigation--were bulldozed and most of the inhabitants expelled in 1948. When I had the word "swaps" in my Engineering English course for Saudi students here, I couldn't find a word to give the Arabic translation of swaps, but after your speech, Al-Arabiyya TV translated it as "tabadul," exchange.
Back to my sympathy for France--let's remember that French, not English, is still a much more precise language for diplomacy, especially in light of Natanyahu's sloppy use of "indefensible," when he meant to gloss over his delusion that Israel, with an atomic bomb and everything, is "undefendable" against Assad, Tantawi, and Abdullah. The Arab countries agreed to the French wording of UN resolution 242, which says Israel must withdraw from "des territoires occupées" --"des," being understood as a contraction of "de" and "les," from THE occupied territories. (The Arabic of 242, is even more precise, since it says withdrawal from "the;" Al- the famous Al-, which has given us so many technical words (we are not that far from the transmission of the pre-Socratics, through Aristotle, to Europe, by Avicenna) like algorithm, alloy, algebra, etc,. The English, on the other hand says, "from occupied territories," which is not clear whether it means calling on Israel to withdraw from all the occupied territories or just from the occasional, or "some," occupied territories. Your "swaps," is just the civil war-Mark-Twain-19th century version of the English version of Resolution 242, and I commend you for animating, in this way, the rather stale English version of 242. (We English teachers always dream of teaching English as a Second Language with Literature, especially Literature of the caliber of Mark Twain or Hemmingway; but we're stuck with TOEFL -Test of English as A Foreign Language- like the history of Coca Cola, Betsy Ross, Paul Revere, the Grand Canyon, and the Gemini Space probe)
However, Natanyahu's misuse of "indefensible" opens the door to taking him up on his English and saying to him, "yes, what Israel did to the Palestinians in 1948, and then again in 1967 is indefensible." Also, what Israel is doing to the land is indefensible. I wish, with the new emphasis on the fight to live ecologically on an ecological planet, somebody would point out that the Arizona-style irrigation systems that Israel put in place, bulldozing over the centuries-old systems that the Palestinians had developed over millennia, are desiccating the land. The aquifers from the northern lakes are being used to pump excessive water into areas where the Palestinians formerly caught the winter rain water and used an elaborate system, developed in the Arabian peninsula during the Roman period--actually transmitted to Roman engineers by the Arabs, probably--and perfected in the Omayyad period, in Syria (c.f. Nelson Glueck's study of the Nabatean irrigation systems of the Negev desert, "Rivers in the Desert." and physical remains of Arab dams and water collecting works in Spanish Andalusia).
I think most Jewish citizens of Israel would agree that the continued refusal of their government to abide by UN resolution 242, which also states that the Palestinians must have the right to return to 1948 Israel, is also indefensible, untenable, and unnecessary. The Palestinians would be glad to live together with the Israelis in their old land, and the modern Israelis who colonized the land no longer need to be on a constant war footing: there is no more talk of fighting Assad, Tantawi, or Abdulla from the hawks, or the doves, in Israel "because of a ship sailing through the straits of Tiran"-this was the excuse Abba Eban and Moshe Dyan gave in 1967 for dropping red-hot walls of Michigan-made, Dow Chemical Napalm on the Egyptian Sinai to take Gaza and the Sinai. The Israelis are pooped out, and no longer enthusiastic about being "fortress Israel" on a constant war footing. They need a democratic secular Palestine. What would happen if they let the Palestinians back in and they worked together to save the land? It would be great! And it would be a shining example of the old civilized days when Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived together fruitfully throughout the Middle East and transmitted their techniques--soap, Alchemy(Chemistry), Hippocratic-Avicennian Medicine, farming(the farmers Almanac), new vegetables from India and Iran(egg-plant-aubergine, Jaffa oranges). It would have repercussions all over, as the ancient systems of working with the existing water came back to the fore,
I know it is hard to change old ways of thinking in the State Department. They won't forgive the Students in Tehran for taking over the US Embassy after the downfall of the Shah--all this talk against the Iranian nukes is the old State Department line of anger that Carter's restoration of the Shah didn't work. Israel's paranoia about Hizbolla in Lebanon is just because the Israeli army got a little licking in I-forget-when and had to leave Tyre, where residents (in exile in Dearborn, MI) say they saw Israeli archaeologists doing the craziest of things--looking for gold under Hiram's tomb! And all this talk of Hamas being a "terrorist" organization is just because most of the Gazan's are refugees kicked out from Majdal (where Mary Magdalene was from and from which she was kicked out by the Romans and went to Saintes Maries de la Mer in France), and from all the coastal towns bulldozed south of Jaffa. (The coastal road is nothing today but cement highways, tenement houses, parched earth..and the 9th century Arab new town of Ramla, which is now known as one of the most notorious oubliettes for Palestinian prisoners, but used to be all orange and olive groves like southern Lebanon and the Gaza strip itself.) Hamas and Fateh are just tweedle dumb and tweedle dee, like the Democratic and Republican Parties in the US. Yasser Arafat's Fateh was deemed to be a terrorist organization by Sharon, who bulldozed Jenin and Ramalla and cornered Arafat in his building, which "proved," by military war that he was a terrorist. The same for Hamas. If you don't recognize the two-state solution, and prefer to hold out for your right, explicit even in UN Resolugion 242, to live alongside the Israelis in your old farming land, you are a "terrorist."
Finally, one more speaking gambit that Natanyahu opened while you were in Ireland, and he was speaking before the House of Representatives was that he expressed concern that Israel is seen as "the bad guy," and that this is not so: he went on to say how the Palestinians within 1948 Israel proper have a kind of democracy that forms a beacon to the youth fighting for employment and rights in the farming villages and cities of Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, etc. But it is not to the youth outside the "sixty-seven borders with swaps" that the Palestinian citizens inside Israel are important. They are important because they are within the belly of the beast, as it were, and work alongside, or at least have the potential to work alongside the Israelis and explain that they can live together and explain that there is a need for a return of the refugees and, thus, for a democratic Israel. It is a tough thing to explain, given the kind of walls between Israelis and Palestinians living in Israel. The Palestinians need a little help from the international community explaining how, indeed, Israel is a colonial settler state--it is sort of the "bad guy"-- yet, the colonists are there now, and yet, and yet, we still need to live with these colonists. It is a matter of water or no water, of life or death, of the land, or of no-land, of the most beautifully designed medieval city in the world(Arab Jerusalem), or a desert without history, of restoring the 500 bulldozed hilltop villages with their natural rain-catching streets and cisterns, or only cement tenements and prisons. It is a matter of patria o muerte, as Che would say. I have attached the famous article Max Rodinson published--a pdf of the French article he got printed in Sartre's "Les Temps Modernes"--to help start helping explain the hiatus that Netanyahu gave us a peek into, in his speech to the House of Representatives.
In concluding, as we watch the Druze of the Hauran(Der'aa, and environs) take up the cudgels to fight for independence in Syria--just as the Hauran started the revolt against the French after Sykes Picot at the end of WW 1--it is a pleasure to recount to you, Mr. President--Ah, can I call you, my slim, elegant hero, like I like to think that I was, too, at your age?--these reflections from the Jurassic period so pertinent to today.
Sincerely,
3011
P.S. If I don't get an automated response within a few days saying no, I will take it that the white house wouldn't mind if I published this, without my signature, on my anonymous blog, which nobody reads anyway, at www.mediterraneancoffeeshops.blogspot.com
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