Wolfensohn is going to cry to Condi 'My Penis is an Oil Tanker' Rice about how bad the Palestinians and Israelis are treating him:
Wolfenson said he was close to a decision to return home and added that he will convey his worries to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice shortly after she arrives in Israel on Sunday evening.
Palestinians and Israelis have played the diplomacy game longer than Bush has been sober. While both play within the general game that the US sets through policy both use their respective positions to play as best they can. The Palestinian Authority has never really understood the parameters of the game, and therefore play pretty badly, but they have moments where they seem to be able rise above their endemic stupidity and corruption to make a brilliant play. But hey, even a chimpanzee can come up with something higher intelligences think is art, even if they only play with sticks and feces.
The Israelis are playing more and more dangerous games. They are coming up hard against the 15-20 year population limit which will turn the 'Jewish' state into a minority state. After over sixty years of racially cleansing Palestine the Zionists are coming to a world where they are the minority in Palestine. People like Sharon are smart enough to see it, but I think most Israelis are not ready for the consequences and are not able to appreciate the fact that the State of Israel as we have known it for the last 60 years is in its' twilight.
The Palestinian Authority can play stupid. Yes Palestinians are dying, yes they are becoming miserable and more desperate on a day to say basis. Sometime you can see desperation percolate as the minutes go by, but what is that in comparison to the power the Palestinian Authority can reap when the Palestinians get a state. Whatever that state may be. Say Israel faces the music and allows Palestinians to becomes "Israeli" citizens, then the PA is poised to reap the goodwill of that exchange for several years and be a political power amongst Palestinians. On the face of things they will have brought this change. Another scenario is that the US forces the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza or both separately, in order to wash its hands of us. This would also leave the PA in a position of power, for a while, but very likely short lived and forced to share with Hamas. Either way, time is on their side, despite the high costs. They already sold out the essence of the Palestinian struggle and given up any claim to Palestinian principles so the misery of several million Palestinians isn't something that weighs too heavily on their conscience.
The Israelis are in the unenviable position of having won almost every single battle, having scored almost every point, having dominated the enemy so thoroughly only to see themselves lose the war. Right now world Jewry is centered in the US and Israel, and with the economic situation for the Israeli state becoming more and more tenuous over the next 15-20 years their prospects for recruiting more Israelis are very low. At this stage almost anyone who is going to emigrate already did. Despite highly publicized trips to Israel, nominally free, filled with propaganda, brainwashing, and lots of emotional arm twisting, more people are leaving Israel, for Europe, Canada and the USA, than are coming in. Palestinians have a much higher reproductive rate that Israelis, and the reproductive rate is not about to go down as the economy totally gets destroyed and more and more people become ultra religious. Between the anvil of poverty and the hard hammer of Occupation ignorance and desperation are being born in an atmosphere devoid of oxygen. Higher Palestinian reproductive rates spell doom for Israel. Israel has always had a hard time selling its image. Only the facts that the occupation happened "long ago" and that Arabs and Jews have been fighting "forever" and that the occupation is "fait accompli" has given Israel the veneer of respectability, but as the Palestinian population keeps rising the veneer is eroding as the State of Israel ceases to have legitimacy as a "Jewish" state. At some point the fragmented West Bank and Gaza might become self-governed, but they'll be self-governed slums and right next to the pristine white Riviera style homes of the European settlers. Coming only within a generation since the end of Apartheid, these images are deadlier than a thousand suicide bombers.
Where does this leave the Americans? American policy had centered around using Israel as a fulcrum to move the Middle East. The actions in the Gulf War have given rise to a situation where Israel is becoming more and more obsolete and expensive. The US cannot have an about face that is too quick or it will risk looking weak in the Middle East. Should it cut Israel loose it would signal a free for all against Israel that could strengthen too many opposition parties in the state the US is trying to cultivate pro-US regimes in. After the first Gulf War American policy makers began realizing that it is cheaper to have people 'voluntarily' support you than to grind them into the ground to achieve the same object. The Gulf, Saudi Arabia, Egypt are such examples. Especially where the local regimes are already weak domestically on a variety of issues. Yet, the Americans can't be seen as being too friendly to Israel, at least not unacceptably so. So who is sent in to pass these rocky rapid? Is this intrepid band of adventurers lead by people who are articulate, versatile, and capable of dealing with so many nuances of the Middle East? No, they send in the most dogmatic, inflexible, inarticulate, and plain stupid gang that can't shoot straight. At the time where the USA needs more capable leaders American hobble themselves by electing not the smartest and the brightest, but people who reflect them so honestly as to be painful. Venal, vindictive, provincial, ignorant, xenophobic, misogynistic, short sighted, dogmatic, corrupt, and arrogant are not traits that are helpful to have when you are trying to lead the world from over six thousand miles away and never have come together so clearly as they have in the second Bush Administration.
They send in a succession of envoys, special envoys, friends, people of interest, Big Names, and characters to massage the "Palestine Problem" all of which are destined to fail. The Palestinian Authority isn't stupid enough to trust the US so completely as to undo themselves, and like chimpanzees cornered by hunters that aren't above flinging shit at the US as last resort. The Israelis on the other hand know full well how expendable they are. If need be the US would cut them loose without a second thought and as the situation gets less favorable to the US Israel is jockeying for a better position hoping that when the fall comes, it doesn't come to hard.
For all its might though the American game is impotent. The Neocons in power haven't yet realized the magnitude of changes coming across the Arab world. Their destabilization of Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon have too many consequences their simplistic world view cannot grapple with. What has not happened yet is somebody calling them on their game. Nobody has yet made the decision to deal with the unknown instability and forsake the current instability that everyone thinks they know.
People talk about the 'realities of the Middle East', the weight of history, and people bred to do this and that, what people haven't confronted yet is that we are for the time being prisoners of little else but out our conceptions. The danger is always there for those people who think that change is not in the air when it is, very few people recover from that mistake. So many agencies making the same mistake has the ingredients of great comedy, tragedy, or most likely, both. Whatever the change though, the people who are paying for it are the people who always pay for it. While governments may lose power and prestige the ordinary person on the street is more likely to lose their life.
