How can you believe since you accept glory from one another but do not seek the glory that comes from the only God? Do not think I will accuse you before the Father. Your accuser is Moses, on whom your hopes are set. If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. But since you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I say? Jesus — speaking to Jewish leaders in the Book of John.
I was born.
A few months later, on 14 May 1948, the UN created Israel, a parcel of land in west Palestine where, displaced by the Holocaust, Jewish refugees could at long last find sanctuary.
Leon Uris wrote a bestselling novel about the period — Exodus. Perhaps some have read it. It’s good.
Based on the book, Otto Preminger produced an award-winning film that starred Paul Newman.
Who has seen it?
Dalton Trumbo wrote the screenplay.
Trumbo is best known for writing the movie, Spartacus — uncredited at the time because a Congressional committee had declared Trumbo communist during the McCarthy era, right? Entertainment moguls blacklisted Trumbo, but a few producers used his talent surreptitiously for various projects.
Look it up, any who don’t believe.
Despite pervasive propaganda to persuade us otherwise, the USA has never been the land of the free and the home of the brave. Yes, it is a cherished line from our national anthem, true. It’s aspirational to every patriot.
But are not American heroes almost always outlaws? — men and women who endure abuse, injury, arrest, prison, and death to move history forward. Bending the moral arc of the universe toward justice is not a quest for cowards.
Think of Martin Luther King, accused by the FBI of being both communist and a serial adulterer. Think of Harriet Tubman, abolitionist and friend of Frederick Douglas, who got her arms broke for riding in the wrong compartment on a train.
Think of John and Bobby Kennedy — John shot soon after firing CIA director Dulles and his acolytes, then reversing Eisenhower’s military buildup in Vietnam; Bobby shot after challenging the Mafia, then daring to oppose Lyndon Johnson for president.
It’s not safe to challenge certain people. Bad people have no limits. It’s one reason people fear them. They kill whoever is in the way to take whatever they want. What they seem to want most is to unleash hell.
Right?
Watch Al Pacino’s movie Scarface for a vivid picture, any who doubt. Who is old enuf to remember that Scarface was the nickname of Chicago mob boss Al Capone, which Cuban interrogators gave to Aleida, wife of Che Guevara? Dictator Batista spread a story that his dogs chewed her face during torture.
Why he spread fake news is anyone’s guess. Some readers might know that Howard Hughes produced the first Scarface movie in 1932. After a heart attack killed Batista in Spain in 1973, Brian De Palma cast Al Pacino in his 1983 version — resurrecting Batista’s nickname for Aleida to anoint his blockbuster.
I’m sick at heart about what’s going on right now in the Middle East. It’s beginning to dawn on ordinary people that leaders there are ruining lives. Children are among the innocents who are dying by the thousands. Ideals are dying, as well.
(Nov. 4, 2023: the United Nations OCHA announced 1.5M civilians displaced inside Gaza.)
The Two State Solution is dead. Its time came and went. Hamas and the IDF killed it.
Who disagrees?
Only the blind do not see emerging in the rubble a path toward some kind of apartheid, where two peoples live apart — separate and unequal. Gaza has become an Orwellian nightmare. The West Bank is a killing field. These horrors cannot continue. They have become wildfires consuming all we love and igniting the world.
Modern weapons of war are lethal beyond belief. Who has heard whispers that certain conventional weapons in the arsenal of USA are capable enuf to repulse nuclear first strikes?
Imagine.
Cities in Gaza and Ukraine are being reduced to dust in days by conventional weapons produced by both North Korea and the United States.
Who will think about what it means? — for a short time, if necessary, to any who have warm hearts beating and minds not yet driven to ghosts by terror that in peacetime ought not be thinkable.
What the hell are we doing?
Who understands that the One State Solution has already come to Palestine?
It is unthinkable to most Americans that realities on the ground could be anything other than what they are, but history proves to all but the naive that current contours of hate cannot survive into the future. The inevitability of change never changes.
The question is whether people will be permitted to live together under some kind of Bill of Rights, which in the American experience at least secures for each person certain inalienable rights, which enable them to live free and unrestrained by whatever superstitions of religion and cults might be fashionable at the time.
It is obvious to most reasonable folks that attitudes and aspirations on all sides must become more realistic, more aligned with decency and respect for differences.
It’s virtually impossible for ordinary people to speak truth to power. The meek fear power. They don’t want to get hurt — or worse. Yet, who hasn’t heard it said that the meek inherit the earth?
It’s why the powerful are always last to know when their time is done. The world changes, no one tells them, and they lose the time they had to set things right. This story consumes all of history, doesn’t it? — it’s an endless journey through human suffering.
To be continued….
Billy Lee
