Matt Bors for April 29, 2014

put yourself in Israel’s shoes. What would you do if all your neighbors were fundamentalist muslims with the dedicated purpose of erasing you from the planet?

The difference is, if the Israelis wanted to exterminate the Palestinians they’d have done it by now.

Due to population trends, Israel will soon be minority Jewish. Minority rule is seldom pretty. I am not naïve enough to believe that ceding land for Palestinians will make a darned bit of difference, though.

My advice to Israel: act like the nerds against the Alpha Betas, and drop the tug-of-war rope. Find a new place to live. Destroy every improvement made on the only piece of land in the Middle East that has no oil. Turn it back into the unforgiving desert it was in 1948. The Palestinians want it so badly: have at it. Enjoy every minute of it. And then Middle Eastern Muslims won’t be able to blame Israel or the US for the troubles caused by their own leaders.

Only slightly tongue in cheek.

Israel became an apartheid state a looooonng time ago.

“In their shoes”? Hmm, like having the only nuclear weapon capacity in the Middle East, the most modern and effective Air Force in the Middle East, the biggest body guard in the world (the U.S. military) waging our wars FOR US, and a P.R. campaign that surpasses all other nations and cultures in the world that makes us always “the victim”, no matter how much land we steal, or who we illegally bomb “proactively”? Those shoes?

I was in Israel for the first time in ‘97, along with 5 other South Africans. For one, who kept getting stopped and having his papers (passport) checked, it felt like the ’old days’; for the 4 others, it felt ‘safer’, military all about etc. We were based in a more ‘liberal’ city, Haifa, but although it was a couple years after the Oslo accords and before the 2nd Intifada and the new Wall, it was still quite plain to see how things really were despite the peaceful appearance, especially when we visited the West Bank.

And to drive the comparison home, let’s draw the Israelis as white, so we know they MUST be the bad guys. If you drew them the same skin tone as the Palestinians (as they frequently are), it would just confuse the narrative.