The Bible Isn't God's Word 2: Waiting for Israel's Destruction.

So trying to destroy Israel is not going to be a mean task, a country with a very efficient army and scores of nuclear weapons. The wait might not be for eternity but it is certainly going to be long, horribly long and in the meantime, Palestinians might try some semblances of other things, even it it is only to kill some of the boredom of waiting.
They can attempt to turn Gaza  and the West Bank into a place flowing with milk and honey. The arguments against such a likelihood may appear so obvious but Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Hong were also densely populated, impoverished countries but today have success stories to tell through determination and unwavering focus. All it needs is a combination of technical ability and enterprise, qualities Palestinians have not been proven to lack. Necessity and desperation are the seedlings of invention and scarce, lean resources can be channeled into watering these little outcrops of growth. The drive and energy and finances  required to take rockets from Iran and fire them at Israel can always be diverted into building more classrooms, improving higher education and acquiring technical inputs to drive the economy and development.
Ancestral homes are very near, just across the blighted border, but they are also far away, so far away. Present demarcations are the products of negotiated settlements that resulted from a series of wars starting from 1948. They are not perfect, undoubtedly, even less satisfactory to those at the receiving end and the UN has passed several resolutions that seeks massive readjustments on the part of Israel. Still they remain negotiated settlements and are most likely to be amended by another set of negotiations. Short of force, which has failed miserably to make belligerents shift their stance. And folks should realize the UN is not going to create a mighty army to drive Israel out of where they presently occupy. The little that has been achieved was arrived at as a result of negotiations and nothing suggests ways cannot be found round the most obdurate of obstacles that stand in the way..
All these may sound sheer poppycock to Hamas, Islamist rulers of Gaza Strip and avowed enemies of Israel, guys at the forefront of the destruction business. But in situations like these, it is easy to overplay one's hand. Assessments shift over time and people do get war-weary. Critics have started suggesting Hamas got behind the recent protests in order to get enough smokescreen behind their increasingly visible failure in governing Gaza. They did get enough smoke, judging from images from the ruinous protests, but it will hardly veil the skepticism welling-up gradually on the part of many Gazans whether the heavy death toll of 58 is worth it all. Gaza is also being blockaded in the west by Egypt, supposedly a Muslim brother. As a result of their ties to Iran, odious enemy to many folks in those climes. Hamas cannot always count on the cooperation of its citizens in trying to resist being hemmed in from both sides. It is not inconceivable that over time, Gazans are increasingly going to see sense in Bertlot Bretch's famous suggestion that food comes first.
One of the most moving images from the recent protests was the sight of folks trying to use catapults to shoot stones at Israeli troops. Some reversal of the David- Goliath story. But it is a Goliath that has morphed into thousands of well-armored soldiers, tanks and nuclear weapons and stones have a bit of work to do. Miracles are also commodities that are in short supply in the present Middle East. However, Goliath didn't have to bare himself to a missile. Israel need not bare herself to catapult-wielding protesters. As the David-Goliath story shows, might is not always foolproof. There is always a caveat to belligerence and one of these is the fact that its arch-enemy, Iran, is also arch-enemy to many Arab countries: Shiites versus Sunnis. And on the basis of this many Arab countries might be willing to prod Palestinians to the negotiation table. An arch-enemy's arch-enemy might be worse than the arch-enemy. This might be a tiny, tiny chink in itself but in the Middle East, where opportunities are at a premium, this might be a huge window.  

The Bible Isn't God's Word, 1

The bible isn't God's word: at least the larger half of it. The Old Testament. That part is definitely the word of the sons of Israel, with a lot of quotations and deeds attributed to God. Jews have always been excellent poets, in addition to many other alluring attributes and have had little trouble turning what is essentially history into a document that tickles human faith and spiritual yearnings. That is why we must take with a pinch of salt statements quoted to a religious leader in the US, relying heavily on quotations from the bible, that God, more than three thousand years ago, ordained Jerusalem as the eternal capital of Israel. If we resist the temptation to delve into long history, Tel Aviv has been the capital of Israel for some time now and nothing catastrophic has happened to the Jewish state. Now, in case the resistance crumbles, the time Jerusalem has not been capital of Israel far outstretches the period it has and nothing distinctly evil has been attributed to that displacement. There has been pogroms, genocides, even a holocaust suffered by the race in between but Armenians also suffered genocides at the hand of Turkey and that disaster has never been linked to the failure or non-observation of a divine will of a place being capital or not. At any rate, Russian Jews should be more interested in Moscow being capital of Russia that Jerusalem being capital of Israel. French Jews should be more interested in Paris... Millions of Jews are there all over the world who don't all that care much for Jerusalem. This is what Trump knows distinctly well and it is a bit difficult arguing with his critics that in moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, he was only trying to fulfill electoral promises made to his core political base which included orthodox Jews and right-wing American Christians. This is what Palestinians should have seen through. They rather allowed themselves to be blinded by needless emotions and 58 of them have been killed in another ruinous confrontation with their arch-enemy.
Apropos of things catastrophic. May 15 is al-Nakba or Catastrophe for Palestinians, the most mournful date in their calendar. On May 14, 1948, the British Mandate ended in Palestine and Israel declared war the following day. In the battles that ensued, more than 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes in territories now occupied by Israel and they have not been able to return home since then. Many of them now live as refugees in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and so on. It is certainly a loss of epic proportions but no more catastrophic than the slaying by David, who later became a great Israeli king, of the giant Goliath, commander of the Philistines, ancestors of the present Palestinians. Going back to the bible, so to say. Jews and Palestinians have both suffered mind-numbing catastrophes in course of their entwined histories, yet they have multiplied. The rhetorics of destruction should now sound a bit tiring on both sides. It is too late for that. That urge is a bit more strident on the Palestinian, at least Hamas, side but they should now realize they have more than 8.5 million Jews to destroy in Israel alone. A huge task, potentially catastrophic considering the fact that their enemy has scores of nuclear weapons. It will do very few people harm changing the tune to new rhetorics now