Opinion

he Palestinian-Israeli nightmare has a solution: men must exit the process.

The blood rivalry is deepening. It’s being used to fuel anti-Jewish/anti-Muslim hatred, spiraling into an epic abyss extending far beyond the Middle East. Global catastrophe stares us in the face.

Parallel disputes have been mitigated, including Northern Ireland’s unhinged 350-year Catholic-Protestant civil war, where women played a key role in bringing about peace.

But this one stands alone. It demands a game-changer.

As everywhere, men are responsible for nearly all the violence. We must now defer to the ultimate arbiters of birth and survival — women.

Only those who bear the first joy and pain of childbirth can grasp the magnitude of this situation.

Here’s how it can go:

Simultaneous referenda must be staged within the Israeli and Palestinian communities.

Several things are happening simultaneously. Most important, Israel has lost the public opinion war in much of the world through its brutality during the recent attack on Gaza and it continues to lose ground even in the wake of a cease fire due to mass arrests of Palestinians and armed police intrusions in and around the al-Aqsa mosque. The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is by its actions making clear that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine will continue at a time that he chooses.

The ceasefire on May 21 has, for now, brought the Israeli war on Gaza to an end. However, this ceasefire is not permanent and constant Israeli provocations anywhere in Palestine could reignite the bloody cycle all over again.

(Note by Gary Kohls:: The sobering information below is from my courageous whistle-blowing friend from Canada, Kevin Annett. It concerns the covered-up, unindicted and therefore unpunished official Canadian genocide and crimes against humanity against the aboriginal people of Canada. Similar crimes against the aboriginal people of the United States exist. The information is based on archival records, eyewitness interviews and the research and the public campaigns of Kevin Annett and The Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada (2000-2005), The Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared (2005-2012) and The International Tribunal of Crimes of Church and State (2010-present).

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Lynette O’Grady had a habit of quickly and succinctly identifying a solution to a particular problem, part of what made her a good editor, and who she is.

This day, she indulged another habit: looking at a pair of shoes, in the House of Guillermo, served by Cesar.

“Yes, miss, how may I help you?” he said.

“Everything in here is so lovely. I’ve heard about this place, but this is my first time in. I don’t really need any shoes …”

“Oh, miss, please, never say those words,” he urged.

“A woman -- every woman -- occasionally needs new shoes. It is part of who you are, or perhaps, who you want to be.”

He flashed a smile as he took her elbow and led O'Grady to a wide display of low-heeled shoes.

The showroom was arranged, shoes on one side and other footwear on the other, both by height of heel. O’Grady saw the symmetry immediately.

“This is fascinating,” she commented.

“Let’s see, if we were to replace the shoes you have on with this outfit, I would suggest … Let’s see what size you are,” Cesar said as he led O’Grady to a chair.

In seconds, she was seated and measured and he was off.

There’s nothing new about this, which is why I know it’s there before having seen the new budget proposal. The United States funds most of the world’s most oppressive militaries, sells them weapons, and trains them. It has done so for many years. But if you’re going to propose an enourmous budget that relies on deficit spending, and you’re going to claim that a gargantuan military budget (bigger than the Vietnam War budget that derailed LBJ’s domestic priorities) is somehow justified, then I think you ought to have to stand and justify every bit of it, including the 40% or so of U.S. foreign “aid” that’s actually money for weapons and militaries — first and foremost for Israel.

A U.S.-government-funded source for a list of the oppressive governments of the world is Freedom House, which ranks nations as “free,” “partly free,” and “not free.” These rankings are supposedly based on civil liberties and political rights within a country, with apparently no consideration of a country’s impact on the rest of the world.

Here’s a video from one of the facilitators lined up for World BEYOND War’s online course on War and the Environment which begins on June 7th, 2021:

This course could not be more important. A culture of extraction and destruction is closely tied to a culture of war. Questioning that ethos of destruction and consumption is challenging, but it has belatedly begun. Challenging a culture of militarism is even harder.

Suddenly a shard of history comes flying at me from the ebbing days of World War II, hitting me in the heart. You mean world leaders (not to mention all the rest of us) were serious about transcending — for good — the hell the world had just been through and     . . . ending war?

In February 1945, President Franklin Roosevelt, on his return from the Yalta Conference with Great Britain and the Soviet Union, and two months before he died, gave an address to Congress, as quoted recently by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies:

The ‘Palestinian Revolt of 2021’ will go down in history as one of the most influential events that irreversibly shaped collective thinking in and around Palestine. Only two other events can be compared with what has just transpired in Palestine: the revolt of 1936 and the First Intifada of 1987. 

When I began writing this piece about fifteen months ago, think back yourself, I wanted to write a snarky piece but that time has passed. Reality plays hard!

Today, 365 days have passed since Geoge Floyd’s murder was videotaped; therefore, the people are here, physically and culturally.

Let me walk us through a social contract: The Great Society, several peoples’ revolutionary movements, and now, what does it take to be anti-colonialist/anti-racist?

Many authors express their perspectives, my thoughts follow, I caution all who follow to be careful there has been a pandemic and economic collapse.

I started writing the article two days after my father, Reverend Doctor Leslie E. Stansbery, passed on February 29, 2020, and nearly two years after my mother, Margaret Dorothy Stansbery (Van der Zee) passed on January 17, 2018. The Trump presidency killed my parents, but more importantly the Great Society is passing as we breathe.