That appalling behavior leads to appalling consequences may be a truism, although in the context of nations it should result in opprobrium for the transgressor. There should be no exceptions, one would think. But ...
Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in Washington. Welcomed, he addressed Congress. Once a rare honor reserved for such dignitaries as Winston Churchill, it has become in recent years a commonplace, and this time merited nothing exceptional in the way of press coverage.
Netanyahu has impeded aid to Gaza and added to the death toll. Between Israeli bombing and grand attacks, the toll as of this writing is over 32,000 Palestinian lives, which is in addition to the 1200 Israelis who lost their lives in the initial Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 ... and another 200 since then.
Bibi has claimed he had no choice. Of course, the obvious choice is to live together without treating Palestinians as second class citizens. At present, they cannot even use the same roads as cars with Palestinian license plates are not permitted to use roads reserved for Israelis only. Did white South Africa think of that one in the apartheid days?
Should numerous other countries in the world with Jewish minorities treat them in the same way as Bibi treats Palestinians? If it were, Bibi would be the first to scream against it, particularly if it would bring him votes in an election. Rightly so, even if it would be the mirror image of Israeli rules and laws for Palestinians.
This blight on humans, the age old tribal rendering of 'us and them' is a blight imprisoning minds unable to look beyond into the universality of mankind.
World governments have been proposed and that is all very well. However, just pick any country and look at the composition of neighborhoods. There are black areas, white areas, even Chinatowns. It is a complex mixture of culture, habits, likes and dislikes that draw people together or keep them apart.
Lee Kuan Yew when he became prime minister of a newly independent Singapore forced the Chinese and Indian populations to mix by taking steps to prevent concentrations of one race into a neighborhood. No Indian ghettoes or Chinese or Malay or of any religious or ethnic group.
Throughout human history, the mighty enslaved the weak -- literally in old times until humans learned better.
At the end of WW2. a fortuitous mix of fear and a wish to avoid past mistakes led to aid for the defeated countries, and eventually to a peaceful and prosperous Western Europe. Russia, backward and falling further behind the West, had to learn the hard way.
Perhaps
the answer to conflict and the urge to dominate will be found through
the human genius of finding solutions even for intractable problems ...
as long as it doesn't take a calamity like nuclear war to give us a
wake-up call.
.
