LogFAQs > #976531404

Ozmose posted...

A lot of people don't know that Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel in 1952, but declined it. Makes you wonder what things would be like if he'd accepted. It probably wouldn't have been world changing, but it's still fun to speculate.

Einstein was a brilliant scientist, but he was no politician (and some of the anecdotes of his personal life suggest he could be a bit of an asshole). I think he was probably very wise to decline the presidency.

faramir77 posted...

Of all the armed conflicts in the world, the one between Israel and Palestine has always made the least sense to me. What a total waste.

I mean, the Palestinians are basically stuck in a permanent prison with no way out. They have no national representation, as Palestine as a nation does not exist (and Israel is doing their very best to keep it that way). Yet the people who do de facto control them on a national level - Israel - give them no representation and only the barest minimum of governmental services.

As long as Israel continues to make itself an oppressor and occupier, the siren call of Hamas and the other jihadist groups in the region are going to find lots of willing listeners. When your alternative is wiling away your life in impoverished misery, striking back at the people who are keeping you that way - however futile a gesture it might be - seems like a pretty good idea. We've seen this over and over again in that region - Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, ISIS in Iraq and Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon. These groups don't find recruits by making it seem really cool to die in a car bomb, they do it because the areas they recruit from are severely impoverished and they're the only ones who offer something that seems like stability, agency, and, most important of all, money. Put together an economically stable region with opportunities, especially for young men, and the prospect of dying to an Israeli bullet is going to seem a lot less enticing.

But it's not going to happen. This conflict is a direct result of Israel's continued rightward drift over the last several decades, and the unfortunate reality is all it's going to do is make Israel tack even further right and erode sympathy for the Palestinian cause within the one country that can meaningfully do something about it. Thousands of people are going to die, Israel is going to make life even more miserable for the Palestinians, that misery is going to breed a new generation of militancy, and we'll be right back here again in a decade or two. Maybe the sheer magnitude of the butcher's bill for this conflict and the failure of Netanyahu and his cronies to prevent it will cause Israel to reconsider their current course... but I highly doubt it.