Palestinian population rising, settlements declining

     For the hell of it, I decided to look up "Israel Palestine statistics" because I felt like writing a small article on the happenings in Israel and my own take on them. Well, I found a graph showing the rise in population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and it made me question how in the hell this graph even works compared to a map of Israel that I found illustrating how both areas are becoming smaller and smaller in recent years.

     If both figures are true, then we can see how easy allegations of genocide would be. Think about it: if the settlements of Palestinians are falling while the population is rising, how would anyone ever keep track of a hypothetical mass disappearance? Now, I'm not saying I believe the Israeli military is exactly that hypocritical, but with Palestinian populations rising as drastically as the respective loss of land, it is hard to imagine these people not living in a shoulder to shoulder environment. Furthermore, if living conditions are forced to be as bad as concentration camps or low budget military housing, then it is equally as hard to imagine how these people find the opportunity to make a living.

     If I haven't committed "anti-Semitism" (as it seems lately to loosely be thrown around by Israeli government officials) in this article, then I will no doubt offend politically conservative Jews twofold by addressing the ultimate hypocrisy in this whole issue. When asked what Israel's problem is— economically, politically, religiously— the answer that is typically given is "the Palestinians". The sentiment among conservative leaning Jewish Israelis is that Palestinians are deserving of death, of being driven off "land that isn't theirs" (note: this land was settled by non-Jews, the same people who resided there until this past century. Also note: the people who settled this land weren't even Muslims when they originally settled it); they tend to believe that Palestinians are completely below them and that it's an Israeli's duty not to be merciful, but relentless in removing these people. I know it's quite cliche at this point to ask it, but I will ask it anyway: doesn't this sound all too familiar? Can we recall a place in recent history that we were forced, as a globe, to address such an issue? I'll let the reader read between the lines, there. 

     A more subtle similarity is to the former apartheid regime in South Africa that was overcome by Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress, and other African socio-political revolutionaries. From 1948 to 1994, the National Party ruled and enforced laws that gave priority to the Caucasian majority and subjected the Afrikaner minority to a second class status. 

     To mark the process of Palestinian voting opportunity as being a "difficult" and "sensitive" issue is quite the understatement. Besides making a trip to the voting booth next to impossible for the average Palestinian, walls have been built not only around Palestinian settlements, but through more and more which is why we see the West Bank breaking apart like ice sheets in the Arctic Sea. In addition to all the unfortunate living conditions being imposed upon the Palestinians, they are also subjected to a version of racism comparable not even to racism of the 1960's in the United States.

     So I will ask the most obvious question there can be: if the numbers of Arab-Israelis and Palestinians are going up, then why have the living conditions gotten worse only for these people? Why have elections not favored a growing minority even in the slightest (proportionately)? Furthermore, why is everyone standing by for this?
~Joe

The Tea Party: Guardians of the Constitution

     The very nature of our country's design was to raise the bar of forward thinking-- that is, liberty, equality, and justice for all. The disagreement between the right and the left lies within what ought to be considered civil liberty and/or what we guarantee as rights to be protected through our government.
     The Tea Party is a group of conservative thought who pride themselves as scholars of the United States Constitution and for defending it against the whim of the collective leftist. In other words, Tea Party people are textualists-- people who take the original document how it was written, word for word and not for what it may or may not have meant. Any claims made about the intent of the original document are promptly stomped out by the simple and indiscriminate idea that the written word means what it means as it lies written on the page.
     When the liberal attempts to provide a justification for something in the Constitution-- whether provable or not-- there is a deterioration of thought and argument, thereby belief, thereby reality. The conservative will defend the Constitution by providing a textual argument from a part of it and the liberal therefore submits his own textual evidence to the contrary and it only creates confusion when we cannot conclude a winning argument because we have essentially created conflict in the Constitution itself.
     The difference between the two sides is that the liberal finds a need to be inclusive while the conservative maintains that there can be no need. While we can fault the liberal for attempting to trace the original meaning of our forefathers, the conservative— who does not consider the need already being accounted for— attempts to use anything but the prejudice that rules their being to seek an end to the argument. Furthermore, we should consider the liberal at fault simply because he or she attempts to engage in the same prejudices as the forefathers (which may or may not be even worse than the prejudices of present conservatives).
     In the end, both parties, both philosophies tread on a most freeing ideology by attempting to defend it. One makes the mistake of objectifying his philosophy and the other by subjecting all to his own prejudice. If nothing could not possibly possess contradiction, then the Tea Party is a group of people not interested in having a logical and practical government and society (in fact, if the Constitution was meant never to hold contradiction, then amendments would never have been possible).
     The Tea Party is as much a guardian of the constitution as New York was any practical help to establishing independence from Britain. Comfort in the ways of the old makes it such an easy argument to prevent forward moving and forward thinking.
     How is a nation forward moving when the ideals it is built on are immovable and non-progressive? People concern themselves with how slow the economy seems to be moving and how unproductive our political representatives seem to be on all different fronts, but no one seems interested in the notion that nothing moves because no one attempts to test both figurative and literal inertia.
     The art of forward thinking is overcoming historical prejudice and that requires not a change in the Constitution, but actually defining what liberty and equality mean today. It will force those who embrace textualism to resort to none-other than their prejudices and, as Burke said, wait until the prejudice dwindles to a minority. Our current duty is not to continue our forefathers' thought, but to parallel it in the context of the present for the sake of liberty and equality.
~Joe